


Moulded Mind

by WingsWithoutStrings



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Android Peter Parker, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, idk how to tag this nonsense, probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2020-12-31 06:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21104228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingsWithoutStrings/pseuds/WingsWithoutStrings
Summary: Honestly, Pepper didn't know why she was surprised. Building an android wasn't even the weirdest thing Tony had done this week.AKA an android!Peter AU inspired by Footloose_Poets' series*Currently on Hiatus (sorry guys!)





	1. Scotch

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly? I have no idea what happened. I read the series "Tony Builds a Son" by Footloose_Poets and actually lost my mind. It’s the only explanation. You can find a link to that series here [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/993537) Honestly can't recommend it enough!

The LMD project came into being after one of Tony’s…extended nights out.

It started off innocently enough. Obadiah insisted that he attend a memorial dinner to mark the day Howard Stark officially launched Stark Industries. To the best of Tony’s recollection, the evening took a sharp downturn when the speeches in his father’s honour began. It only spiralled further downwards when a member of the board decided to pronounce him the living embodiment of his father’s legacy. A harmless enough comment in hindsight, certainly one he’d heard before, but it did push him to trade in the dry wine they’d been serving for something a little stronger.

He remembered striking up conversation with the date of one of his major competitors (not that he could for the life of him remember either of their names). At some point, they staggered out through the fire exit and made their way into a night club she favoured. He couldn’t remember at what point she left, but he knew others took her place. Vague memories of a hotel and passable champagne drifted through his head, though he couldn’t be sure if they were from the first night or the second. Things got especially hazy after day three, and he’d retained only a vague sense that there _was_ a day four. His next distinct memory consisted of Rhodey hauling him to his feet (did he fall or pass out this time?) and shoving him into the backseat of a car.

“Hey, Happy,” he slurred, jerking back before Rhodey could slam the car door in his face (was it his imagination, or did he use a little more force than necessary?).

“Morning, rough night?” Happy asked, resentment seeping into his voice despite his best effort. As much as he wanted to remain professional, he definitely didn't enjoy being called in at three in the morning to pick up his intoxicated boss.

Tony passed out again before he could even consider the question. He tried his best to block the hangover he woke up with out of his memory, and Rhodey certainly wasn’t offering him any sympathy. Pepper at least had the decency to wait until the splitting pain in his head subsided before yelling at him for disappearing for days on end without so much as a text. After a forty minute lecture, a phone call from the finance offices distracted her long enough for Tony to escape to the lab.

It took all of three seconds for Dum-E to trip him up, whirring and spinning in excitement as if oblivious to Tony’s curses.

“Hey, JARVIS? Do we still have coffee down here?”

“_A fresh pot is brewing as we speak, sir_.”

Tony collapsed into his desk chair with a sigh of relief. “What would I do without you, J?”

“_I’m sure you’d come up with something_.”

He sobered up as his thoughts wandered back to the _real_ Jarvis. For the first time since his days at MIT, Tony wondered what the old Stark family butler would have had to say about having the most advanced AI in history named after him.

Perhaps the memorial dinner cut him deeper than he’d been willing to admit.

A part of him wanted to blame the whole ordeal on the lingering effects of the drugs and the persistent hangover which made it rather difficult to think things through properly. Maybe it was the desperate need for a decent distraction that drove him to sketch out the vague concepts and designs floating through his head, but it soon became clear it wouldn’t be enough.

He knew he’d get another lecture from Pepper, but he found himself passing the coffee pot in favour of the minibar he kept fully stocked for emergencies such as this one. He normally avoided drinking in the lab, but he didn’t see the harm so long as he stuck to sketching.

Another hazy night of dreams laced with gin. Another morning spent nursing a hangover. He had the house to himself, at least. He supposed Pepper must have gone home at some point because he saw no sign of her when he staggered upstairs. It was another day before it occurred to him to assess the damage of his drunken experimentations, but what he found made him pause.

With JARVIS’s help, he put together a fairly coherent timeline of everything he’d gotten his hands on in his inebriated state. He’d made a handful of minor alterations to existing projects, nothing too extreme or damaging. A few could even be called improvements.

JARVIS led him forward to a file which had apparently demanded the majority of his attention, inside he found 3D renditions adapted from one of his side projects. Advanced prosthetics for injured soldiers, one of the few non-lethal projects he’d dabbled in over the last few years. Even the prototypes were more advanced than anything else on the market, Obadiah planned to produce and donate a handful of them as part of their very public fundraiser supporting ex-soldiers.

For reasons Tony couldn’t quite recall, he’d chosen to continue working on an already completed design for a prosthetic arm.

Tony sent the design to the holotable for closer inspection, brow furrowing as he took in the designs for what looked like the better part of a human torso. The work wasn’t bad considering Tony couldn’t even remember designing it. He made a motion with his hand, and the holotable generated a colour-coded rendition of the sketch. Artificial tendons lit up before his eyes, fusing artificial muscles to artificial bones. Where the first design had been created to respond to a human amputee, this appeared to be something else entirely. It continued well beyond where the original design ended at the elbow, the intricate interface designed to respond to muscle movements had been cast aside in favour of creating a complete and independent limb.

The design grew less detailed as it progressed, as if Tony had been so desperate to give it physical form that he’d forgone the intricacies in favour of documenting as much of it as possible. He’d made it to the shoulder blade before either the alcohol or the fatigue halted his progress. The lines were wonky where the shoulder blade should have ended, jagged edges where there should be smooth curves.

Tony didn’t make a conscious decision to correct the mistake, but all the same he immersed himself in the project once again as if he couldn’t comprehend the idea of leaving the design unfinished. It had no immediate purpose that he could see yet, but the methodical process was exactly what he needed to ease him out of his latest self-destructive episode. He finished the shoulder and backtracked to fill in the details he’d missed out the night before, stopping only to compare materials for his design. He structured the delicate tendons and tissues of the rotator cuff, manoeuvring the rendering to finish off the artificial clavicle. The other arm was more or less a mirror image of the first, allowing Tony to skip straight to the spine.

He didn’t follow any particular structure in his designing, allowing himself to go off on tangents and explore the design as he pleased. He could fill in the gaps when he found the time, the project was as good as useless anyway.

JARVIS limited interruptions as much as possible. He ensured Tony had consistent access to a source of caffeine and drank plenty of water, steering him clear of the mini bar where possible (he didn’t need much convincing now; with his mind focused on the project he rather preferred his thinking clear.)

The hours flitted by without his notice, so immersed in the delicate strands and intricate mechanisms. In the end, he exhausted his emergency coffee supply and was forced to retreat from his lab. Since he was upstairs anyway, he popped a few more Advil to chase away the last remnants of his hangover. He tried to remember to drink the glasses of water Dummy brought him and JARVIS returned the favour by keeping the criticisms on his caffeine intake to a minimum.

It was easy to lose your sense of time down in the lab. No natural light of any kind, no clocks placed in plain view, privacy settings to filter out all non-essential contact with the outside world. The perfect refuge, if not for one _tiny_ detail.

“_Sir, Colonel Rhodes is upstairs._”

Oh yeah, a handful of people outside of the lab had his address.

“Let him know I’m down here,” Tony said without looking up. With any luck, Rhodey would leave him be once he saw him working on a project instead of drinking himself to an early grave.

Immersing himself in the careful stitching of artificial tendons, he almost missed the _swish_ of the automatic door. What he recognised as the opening line of another lecture forced him back to reality.

“You told me you’d call as soon as you got up, Tony.”

“I was getting around to it,” Tony said with a wince. “Just-ah got side-tracked.”

“It’s been _two days_, Tony.”

_That_ was news.

“JARVIS?” he asked with a frown.

“_It’s currently 4:22pm on Thursday, sir_.”

…Huh, what do you know.

“I’ve been busy,” he shrugged, frown deepening when he reached for his coffee cup and found it empty. _That_ simply wouldn’t do.

“Busy,” Rhodey repeated.

“Is that _scepticism_ I detect? Are you questioning my work ethic?”

“Yes.”

“…Okay, that’s fair.”

Tony crossed the lab to fill the empty coffee cup, not trusting Dummy to do it after the mess he made of the last mug. Now he looked at it, he should really clean out his coffee pot at some point.

“What _is_ this?” Rhodey called out from the holotable. He craned his neck to examine the hologram without stepping in range of the controls. He learned the hard way that holotables were nowhere near as easy to operate as Tony made it seem.

“Knee joint, trickier than you may think.”

“For the wounded veterans project?” Rhodey asked with a hint of approval. Tony shrugged and held up an empty mug in offering. Call it a peace offering, if you will.

“I’ll pass, last time I let you make me coffee it took a full three days for the jitters to stop.”

So much for his peace offering.

“I was experimenting,” Tony defended, pointedly returning the proffered mug.

“So is this what you’ve been working on since you got back?” Rhodey asked, waving to the holographic rendering.

“In part.” Tony stepped into range of the table and made a pinch gesture, bringing the rest of the model into view. Rhodey’s eyes widened as he took in the image of what, on first glance, looked like the kind of diagram you might expect to find in a medical school. Closer inspection revealed the same absurd level of detail he’d seen on the blown up renditioning of the knee joint.

“Holy shit, Tony. How long have you been working on this?”

“Since you dropped me off,” he said with a shrug and shuffled back to the coffee machine. Rhodes didn’t respond. “What?”

“You did all this in a couple of _days_.”

Again, Tony shrugged.

“Would it work?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you built it, would it work?”

“Work for what? It’s not designed to _do_ anything; I was just screwing around.”

Rhodey stared at him.

“Tony," he said slowly, "you’re building an android.”

Tony snorted. “Dum-E’s one thing, _that_ is quite another. Besides, what the hell am I going to do with an android? I build weapons, as Obadiah is so keen to remind me. Speaking of, I have _real_ work to do.”

“So…you’re not finishing this?”

“Well…It might be good to get it out of my system first. I’m most the way there, anyway.”

“And you’re seriously telling me you’re not going to try building it after all the work you’ve put in?”

Tony stared at the image hanging in the air above his holotable. How long had it been since he got his hands dirty? Not just working on cars, not just small scale projects or designing blueprints. How long since he got his hands on a _challenge_?

He already knew the answer to his question; when he custom built the hardware for JARVIS to operate the Malibu house. JARVIS had already evolved a great deal since he built him, he knew he’d need to create something adaptable, something he could expand if he needed to. Co-ordinating with the designers and construction teams was an absolute nightmare, as was physically wiring him into the house, but the servers under the house were a source of great pride for Tony. If you asked Obadiah what Tony’s greatest accomplishment in this world would be, no doubt he would point to the arsenal of weaponry designed under his watchful eye. Stark men were always best at creating things to destroy, but Tony wouldn’t hesitate in answering JARVIS. Not for a second.

“Well,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t say that.”

xxx

“You told me I could take the rest of the day off,” Tony reminded Obadiah.

“I figured you could use the fresh air. I didn’t mean you should spend the whole day in the lab and slack off work.” His jovial tone did a fine job of concealing his irritation, but Tony knew better.

“I’m working on a side project. And before you asked, no, it doesn’t have any military applications.”

Irritation lanced across Obadiah’s expression, cutting through the fleeting look of interest. “We’re a _weapons manufacturer_, Tony. If you’re not making weapons, what’s the point?”

Tony shrugged and went back to work unboxing the new materials. “I’m making it on my dime and on my time, that’s all that _should_ matter.”

Obadiah changed tactics, switching from a company interest to a concerned father-figure as easily as Tony would change clothes. “Can I look at your plans, at least? It must be something big to demand this much of your attention.”

Tony waved to the holotable, already lining up tools on his workbench. He couldn’t remember the last time he'd even _used_ this workbench. Obie quietened as he browsed through the schematics. Already Tony had all but forgotten he was even there.

“I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself, Tones,” he commented as he skimmed the designs. “How realistic do you imagine this turning out?”

For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, Tony felt oddly queasy. “Hard to say. Why? What are you thinking, Obie?”

“Well, sure, we couldn’t _mass produce_ it, but if you’re willing to take it on yourself…Well, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to show off just what we’re capable of. We build it claiming it could work as a decoy in high risk situations, something the enemy could mistake for a soldier in a pinch. Maybe we could even use it for bomb defusal. It may not be a sustainable product, but if it works at all, Stark Industries would be celebrated for revolutionising the field of robotics…”

Trust Obadiah to put a price tag on a side project.

“Your call, once I’m finished with it you can tell the investors what you like,” Tony said, making shooing motions with his hands to indicate he wanted to get on with it.

Obadiah stayed where he was a moment longer, Tony felt his eyes fixed on his back.

“This is good work, Tones,” he said before he left.

Obadiah didn’t interrupt the next time he took a day off.

xxx

“So…what is this thing called again?” Pepper asked as she watched Tony work from the desk.

“A Life Model Decoy. LMD for sure.”

“And it’s…a robot.”

“Automated humanoid,” he corrected.

“But it’s a robot.”

“…Yes.”

“I need you to sign this.”

Tony sighed, but stepped away from the workbench to accept the tablet and stylus she offered him all the same. She explained the reason behind the mountain of paperwork not twenty minutes ago, but already he found himself struggling to recall what he was signing off on.

Oh well, if Pepper thought it looked right, who was he to question her judgement?

“I’m still not sure I understand _why_ you’re building it. Don’t you have deadlines coming up?”

“It’s just something I’m working on in my downtime,” Tony said with a shrug and returned to the ankle joint. He couldn’t remember the last time his designs came together so smoothly. “Obie approved it.”

She hummed and handed the tablet back to him with another document to sign.

“It looks pretty intricate.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Almost…fragile.”

Tony paused, unsure of exactly what she was insinuating there. Still, when he examined his handiwork through the magnifying attachment and saw the miniscule attachments, the way they interlocked and worked in perfect unison. Saw how the wrong amount of pressure in the wrong place would be all it would take to make it fall apart…Perhaps fragile wasn’t an _inaccurate_ description.

“How many more of these things do I have to sign?”

“Tony! We just went over this!”

xxx

“It looks kind of creepy.”

“That’s because it’s not done yet.”

“Does it need to be hanging there _right now?_”

“This is my lab, Rhodey. Where else am I going to put it?”

“I don’t know dude, but you have a _half assembled person_ hanging off the wall and it’s freaking me out!”

“It’s not a person, it’s an automated humanoid.”

“Why can’t you just call it a robot like any other rational human being?”

“Dum-E is a robot, that’s something else.”

“Android, then.”

“Makes me feel like I’m working on a smartphone.”

Rhodey sighed. “Fine, you win, you have a half-assembled _automated humanoid_ hanging on your wall and it’s _freaking me out_.”

“Don’t look at it, then.”

“That’s _worse_ because I know it’s behind me…watching me.”

"It can't watch you, Rhodey. It doesn't have eyes," Tony deadpanned while trying to keep a straight face.

"It's not stopping that thing. I'll say that right now."

Tony sighed and crossed the lab space, rotating the frame that would soon make up the robot's head 180 degrees until the mannequin-esque impression of a face was turned to face the wall.

"Better?"

Rhodey watched the movement with abject horror.

"Jesus Christ, Tony. No!"

xxx

"I still preferred it when you built robots that actually looked like robots," Rhodey established.

"I'm aware."

"This is weird, Tony."

He shrugged. "The military picked the faces, not me."

"Yeah, believe it or not, that wasn't what was bothering me."

"Care to explain how I'm supposed to develop a robot that appears human without giving it a face?"

"...It's still creepy."

"Would you prefer I use someone else's face?"

"Hmm, let me think about that one. _No_."

"Well, what do you suggest I do about it? This isn't exactly an obscure side project I can drop whenever I feel like it anymore, Obie's expecting these renditions."

"Since when do you jump into action to meet deadlines?"

"Since when do you _discourage_ me from meeting deadlines?"

"...Alright," Rhodey sighed. "Show me the pictures."

Tony waved his hand and the display lit up. The algorithm scanned through the military supplied profiles of existing soldiers, noting patterns, compiling randomised computer renderings based on their individual features. The whole process only took a few seconds.

"Why do they all look so young?" Rhodey asked with a frown as the next batch of generated images appeared.

"Did you miss the part where I said the military supplied the pictures? I guess they decided to base the rendering on recruitment photos. Bring it up with Obie, he was the one they talked strategy with. I'm just the one being commissioned to build it."

Not that Tony minded. He had to admit, it made a refreshing change from constructing weapons of mass destruction.

"Here, what about this one?"

Rhodey made a face. " It looks so...fake."

"It's just a rendering, it'll look more real once I actually build it."

"Sir, I hate to interrupt but Miss Potts is requesting confirmation on your schedule for this week."

"Perfect!" Rhodey said, leaping at the chance to pass this bizarre responsibility onto someone else. "Ask for Pepper's opinion."

Tony opened his mouth to argue before reconsidering his stance. They weren't making a whole lot of progress on their own...

"I suppose it couldn't hurt. JARVIS, ask Pepper to join us down here, tell her I promise to help her out with the scheduling if she helps me out with this project first."

It didn't take more than a few minutes for Pepper to show up at the door, a wary expression on her face and armed with a tablet.

"What do you want, Tony?"

"Ouch, you almost sound suspicious of me."

"The last time you asked me to help you, you got engine grease on my best skirt."

He winced. "No engine grease this time, I promise. Pick a face."

The suspicion gave way to curiosity. "A face? For what?"

"The LMD, Obie got a selection of sample photos from the military and now we have to choose a computer generated rendering. Pick one."

She stepped closer to get a better look and wrinkled her nose. "This is creepy."

"_SEE_?"

Tony threw his hands in the air. "See what I get for trying to stick to a deadline?"

"Alright, fine. That one."

"See, Rhodes? Was that really so difficult?"

"I didn't even want to be involved in this in the first place."

"Helloooooo? I'm building this for the military."

"I'm a pilot, Tony," Rhodes deadpanned. "Unless this thing can fly, I really don't see how this affects me."

"Are we done?" Pepper asked. "Because I really wasn't kidding about needing to organise your schedule."

"Hold on a second, which one did you point to again?"

Rhodey leaned in closer to get a better look at her choice.

"Bit young looking, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh not that again."

"What? You called me in for my opinion, right? I'm just saying he looks young."

"He looks honest," Pepper decided. "The others all look too much like mugshots."

"You've got a point there," Tony said under his breath. Something about the rows of blank, expressionless faces did make it seem like they were flipping through suspect list. "Alright, we'll go with that one."

xxx

"It doesn't need to be THAT fancy, Tony. It's just supposed to be a prototype."

"I know that."

"What you've already accomplished is amazing, Tones. Beyond anything else on the market, that's for sure."

"I'm still on schedule, aren't I?"

"...Frankly, Tony, that's part of what's worrying me."

"You're worried that I'm not slacking off? You've never been one to support me skipping out on projects in the past."

"Of course I don't support it but...You're letting this take over your life, Tones. When's the last time you got out of here, huh? It seems like you've dedicated every spare second to this. Maybe it's time to hand it off to someone else, someone who's time is a little less valuable, huh? You've done the hard part, your designs have all been nothing short of immaculate. Maybe leave the construction work to the techies, what do you say, Tones?"

Tony stopped typing.

"You're saying I should...give up?" He asked in disbelief.

"God no. Tony, you're not listening. You've already won! Your models are revolutionary, they're going to work. I'm just saying...Maybe it's time to move on to the next thing. Know when it's time to leave well-enough alone."

This...wasn't a situation Tony ever expected to find himself in. Down in his lab, sober and on schedule. No dates, no parties, no arrests, no skipping out on board meetings to go skinny dipping in a public fountain with two girls he didn't know the names of (and wasn't that an interesting night to try and explain the next day. He never did find his tie). And yet, here Obie was discouraging his behaviour.

Had he really been spending that much time in the lab lately? He'd always lost himself in projects in the past...was this one really so different?

It must be if Obie felt the need to stage an intervention.

"I can finish the job, I'll just take it easy from here on out. Keep the bells and whistles to a minimum. You got it."

Obadiah breathed a sigh of relief, offering Tony an encouraging pat on the arm.

Tony didn't drop the project.

xxx

The project progressed easily, pieces fitting together where he'd normally expect complications.

As far as Obadiah was concerned, Tony continued to build the framework for his new creation at a steady pace, but one that indicated he'd fallen back into old routines. Days spent off the grid, gaps in his journal logs where he was timetables to do repairs (though he always, _always_ made up the time later).

Instead of spending these off days in clubs and drunk tanks, he used them to refine the LMD's programming.

If all went according to plan, Obie wouldn't have to know the LMD was capable of anything outside the most basic parameters. Coordination, mobility, maybe a few tricks thrown in to impress an audience. That's all he wanted from this, really. Something to _impress_.

Their investors had low expectations compared to Tony's standards.

Fortunately, Tony had a fair bit of experience designing AIs by now. He used the same model he applied when building JARVIS; flexible programming that would learn as it progressed. He planted the seeds of a personality there, just enough to allow for the development some day. A little nudge to allow for a sense of humour, a flavour of character that could evolve with time. He had no patience for bland AIs. The body wasn't ready to inhabit yet, but JARVIS had more than enough room in his servers to share.

"Now all we need is a name," Tony sighed.

"_And here I thought LMD_test had such a nice ring to it._"

"No one likes a smart ass, J."

"_Of course not, sir_."

Tony rubbed his temples to alleviate a pressure not quite intense enough to be called a headache. Yet.

God, he needed a drink.

"Why am I still bothering with this project?"

JARVIS took his time responding, already a sorry indication given his computational capacity.

"_It doesn't seem unusual for you to become overly invested in projects when you want to take your mind off something, sir_." 

On second thought, Tony didn’t really feel like self-reflecting anymore.

Of course, luck would have it that Pepper walked into the lab just as he broke the seal on a bottle of bourbon he couldn’t remember buying. Perhaps it had been a gift from one of the stuffy board members – or from an event maybe? It looked like the kind of thing he handed off to his assistants. Still, it looked a hell of a lot more appealing than the bottled soda that always seemed to magically appear in the lab fridge.

Perhaps it was a ploy to get him to drink something other than booze and coffee.

“I thought you were cutting back.”

The sudden noise startled him so badly he almost dropped the bottle.

(He didn’t have the shakes, though. He’d had substance abuse problems in the past, sure, but that was with harder stuff. The odd drink didn’t count, right?)

“What gave you that idea?” he asked, trying not to snap. It wasn’t Pepper’s fault she caught him at a bad time.

(Just one little drink to calm his nerves. Maybe Obie was right, maybe he needed to blow off a little steam.)

“I haven’t seen you drinking much lately. Not since you started that new project,” Pepper said with a nonchalance that didn’t fit with her hesitation. Standing by the door as if prepared to bolt – perhaps afraid of overstepping some invisible boundary in their relationship.

Sometimes Tony forgot he was Pepper’s boss.

"I've been keeping busy."

"With the LMD?"

"Obie told me to pull back on that."

"But you're still working on it." It wasn't a question.

He should have known better than to try and keep something from Pepper.

Tony turned over the bottle in his hand, studying the label as an excuse to avoid meeting her eye.

"I can't give up on this one, Pep. I just can't." He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't for her to reach out as if to comfort him. Her fingertips reached out to skim his forearm. The edges of her fake nails - a deep pink today – dragged at his skin as her fingers traced a gentle swirl that ended on the inside of his wrist. Not quite enough courage to take his hand, but enough to let Tony know she wanted to.

“This is important to you,” she observed. He let out a harsh laugh in way of reply, not trusting himself to speak.

“When was the last time you got some sleep?”

In truth, he wasn’t sure. He had a tendency to bury himself in his projects, he wouldn’t deny it, but this time it was different. The neglect ran deeper than could be reasonably excused as being _distracted_. The pulsing in his head – most likely caused by dehydration – didn’t drive away the nagging feeling that something was missing. Something important, forgotten in the rush.

He needed that drink.

He needed to finish the LMD.

And yet, when those long pink nails closed around the neck of the bottle, he offered no resistance. They clicked together again as she prised it from his unresisting fingers, and for a moment he wondered why it seemed so loud. Only then did he realise she’d turned off his music.

Immediately he missed the cold tang of the chilled glass against his skin. The inexplicable urge to raise his fingers to his lips and taste the water droplets the glass left behind gripped him, but he allowed Pepper to take hold of his wrist and guide him up out of his chair instead.

“It doesn’t have a name yet,” Tony said. As soon as he said it, he couldn’t put into words why it seemed so vital that she know this.

“The LMD?” she asked with a frown. He didn’t reply, couldn't offer any more resistance when she guided him up the stairs and away from the lab. JARVIS turned off the lights after they left, he could see the glow of the monitor through the glass doors as he saved Tony’s work and ran standard shut down procedures.

It felt wrong to leave the LMD unfinished, but Tony couldn’t find the will power to break free of Pepper’s grasp. Everything seemed murky. Undefined.

In searching for a solution, he reached for caffeine rather than sleep, but he knew better than to question Pepper’s judgement.

He couldn’t remember if he dreamt at all that night, but he slept until well past noon the next day. To his surprise, he found all of his morning appointments had been rescheduled or handed off.

When he staggered back into the lab, he found a takeaway bag containing the Sunday breakfast from one of the better diners in the nearest town, a thermos filled with coffee which was still miraculously warm, and a sticky note written in Pepper’s careful cursive.

_I asked Happy to make the trip _  
– don’t throw it away without eating it.  
JARVIS is watching.

_P.S. Ask for the list._

Tony frowned. “J? What’s the postscript supposed to mean?”

In response, JARVIS activated one of the monitors. Tony squinted through bleary eyes, taking a sip of the cooling coffee as he crossed the room. Not as strong as he normally took it, but still pretty good.

It took him a few seconds longer than he’d care to admit to put together what he was saying.

It was a list of names.

A smile spread across his face as the details of last night blossomed in his mind.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

He leaned forward to skim the list, noting the ones he thought had potential.

“Peter,” he murmured aloud. It was one of the more common names on the list, but if Pepper thought it worked…

“_I believe Miss Potts said that was one of her favourites._”

“Is that so?”

xxx

A few weeks went by without incident. Tony continued to work on the LMD, though he made more of an effort to balance it with his other projects. He didn’t bring up that night and neither did Pepper.

Everything seemed to have gone back to normal…or so she thought.

In all honesty, she should have paid more attention. It didn’t occur to her to ask about the specifics of how the LMD was progressing, though she’d known Tony long enough to know he rarely thought to mention things that any _reasonable human being would_.

She entered the lab on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, running through their weekly list of orders. They had standard items that always needed restocked, as well as resources Tony asked JARVIS to add that she wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce, let alone investigate the use of. Tony needed them and for once they were all perfectly legal to obtain – she didn’t want to know anything more than that. Still, Pepper needed him to sign off on any additions she made, and they _really_ needed to update their grocery order.

Pepper pushed open the lab door, nose buried in her tablet as she responded to an email confirming Tony’s donation for a charity gala later that week. At least this way the cause wouldn’t lose out if he didn’t show up.

On a different day, one that allowed for more sleep and less paperwork, she may have paid more attention instead of dismissing the movement in her peripheral vision as being Tony.

“I know you said you’d be busy today, but I need you to-“

There was no other way to put it, Pepper screamed.

Tony swore from across the lab as he bashed his head on the underside of the car he was working on, tools clattering to the floor as he scrambled out from underneath it.

“Jesus, Pepper! What the hell happened?”

The _thing_ sitting on his workbench inclined its head, regarding her through empty camera lenses in place of eyes. Once his heart stopped pounding, Tony allowed himself a moment to observe the scene and put together exactly what had happened.

“You knew about the LMD,” he said with a frown.

She found herself struggling to string words together as the thing continued to stare at her.

“_That’s_ the LMD?!”

“It’s not finished yet.”

Pepper liked to think she was a rational sort of person. She understood the principal of personification perfectly well.

The thing perched on the work bench wasn’t human. It wasn’t even alive…but when she laid her eyes upon its oddly skeletal framework, her mind summoned words like _disfigured_ and _ill_. Even without many identifying features, she could see the humanoid outline in the jumble of wires and mechanical parts she couldn’t even begin to put a name to.

Dark grey metal glinted under the harsh lab lights as the mechanical body turned its empty eyes towards Tony at the sound of his voice. She could see every tiny mechanism that went into the movement as it shifted, like muscles that should have been buried under a layer of skin. It didn’t have a face to speak of, but she could see the beginnings of one now that she knew to look. The curvatures in the blank framework that would eventually become cheek bones, the jutting angle of a jaw, the protrusion of a nose, and, of course, the camera lenses.

She bent down to retrieve her fallen tablet, only to freeze in place when it turned its head back to watch her.

“It can’t do much right now,” Tony said, as if completely unaware of how God damn _terrifying_ the thing looked right now. “The AI is still in its infancy; I’m just letting it observe for now. This is something of a trial run. It’s been running in the background on my private servers for a while now, but it’s never interfaced with the LMD’s hardware before. I’m going to let JARVIS finish his diagnostics before I _really_ get to work…You want me to introduce you?”

“Oh my _God_, Tony!”

“What?”

Genuine bemusement crossed his face, creasing his brow and tugging on the corners of his mouth. Pepper forced herself to take a deep breath and reminded herself that Tony had been working on this project for _months_. She could see the intricacy in its design, the work he’d put in. God, every piece made and positioned by _hand_.

She shouldn’t judge a half-finished project, especially not when she barged in unannounced.

“I just…didn’t realise you were so far along.”

Tony looked back at the LMD in surprise before shrugging. “I’ve been making steady progress, I guess. Hey, Peter, say hello to Miss Potts.”

Something inside that metal framework whirred to life. It seemed to reposition itself, tilting its head again as if in thought before raising one of its mechanical arms into the air. Metallic fingers clicked together as they flexed in an odd, spasming motion that she supposed was meant to be a wave.

“You…named it Peter?”

“Didn’t I mention it?” he asked as he took a step back to read JARVIS’s diagnostic reports off the nearest monitor. So far, everything seemed to be right on schedule.

Pepper couldn’t help but smile at that. She straightened up, trying to recover some of her professionalism. The LMD lowered its hand again with stuttering movements and returned to its original position.

“It’s nice to meet you, Peter,” she said, though it felt strange to address it so casually when it better resembled a mannequin than an actual person. It turned to look at her again, sightless eyes reflecting her own face back at her. She got the sense that, if it were able, it would be squinting.

Clearly it wasn’t programmed to do much beyond that, so Pepper did her best to continue where she left off. The edge of the tablet screen had fractured where she’d dropped it, but Tony didn’t comment as he signed the forms she waved under his face. He checked the diagnostic twice before returning back to his sports car with assurances from JARVIS that he would be informed if anything meaningful came of it.

When she turned to leave, she couldn’t help but hesitate before turning her back to the LMD. It still sat motionless on the workbench, legs dangling over the edge like it could jump down and take off at any moment. For all she knew about Tony’s progress, maybe it could.

She wouldn’t put it past him.

“Bye, Peter,” she said softly, too quiet for Tony to hear from across the lab. It turned to look at her again, this time it only took a second for it to raise its hand in a wave.

It may look a little creepy now, she decided, but she’d get used to it.

xxx

“Jesus, Tony. That’s a _robot_?”

“You saw me build it.”

“Well…Yeah but it’s different seeing you work on odd pieces and seeing…_this_. It looks human!”

“That’s kind of the point.”

“You know what I mean, Tones. This is _big_. Is there even anything else like it on the market? Hell, forget the market – in the _world_?”

“Probably not, progression’s been pretty slow in this area. You want me to introduce you, or do you want to continue standing there gawking at it?”

“Can it…understand me?”

“What kind of a hack do you take me for, Platypus?”

“Right, sorry. It’s just…a lot to take in.”

Tony shrugged and took a step forward. Recognising the cue, the LMD raised its head from its stationary position and smiled. Facial expressions still looked a little strained, Tony made a mental note to work on that.

“Hey, Peter. This is Rhodey.”

A beat passed before the LMD frowned, brow creasing as if they were deep in thought.

“Rhodey,” they repeated, tilting their head. “Did I hear that right?”

“Sure did.”

The LMD nodded and paused for another beat before their face lit up in an expression of sheer joy. “It’s nice to meet you, Rhodey!”

Rhodes gave Tony a look that might have been a plea for help, but his traitorous friend merely gave him an encouraging shove forward.

“Um, nice to meet you too…Peter,” he attempted, studying the proffered hand in the same way someone might consider a set mouse trap. The LMD waited longer than any person would have before letting the hand fall back to their side. They tilted their head again, studying Rhodey just as Rhodey studied him.

“Well,” Tony said, clapping his hands together. “That went about as well as I could have expected.”

xxx

The LMD became a staple in the lab, needing to spend most of its time connected to a charging point to keep functioning. Obie looked impressed when he saw it, though he didn’t interact with Peter enough to grasp the full extent of his capabilities. Despite his encouragement, he didn’t offer much more than a shrug when Tony explained that he couldn’t find a sustainable power source for him.

_Yet_, Tony thought but didn’t say when Obie clapped him on the back and told him not to fuss over a side project. There wasn’t a battery in the world that would allow Peter to walk freely – nothing short of strapping a nuclear reactor to his back. Still, he’d built the most sophisticated piece of robotics on the planet with a fully integrated AI that he hoped would someday outgrow even JARVIS.

It should have been enough.

Tony vowed to build a better battery.

xxx

“Good morning, Miss Potts,” Peter said brightly.

“Morning, Peter,” she greeted without missing a beat. “Is Tony around?”

“He asked JARVIS not to disturb him this morning.”

She hummed in acknowledgement. Her expression spoke of disapproval. “Does he have…company?”

Peter tilted his head the way Tony programmed him to when he interfaced with JARVIS (_you said it was creepy when he just went blank faced and stared, Pep. I had to replace it with something_). “We don’t have any visitors in the logs. I could ask?”

A small smile tugged at Pepper’s lips, though she’d never admit to feeling relieved.

“ That won’t be necessary, Peter. Were we expecting a delivery?” she asked. Asking JARVIS would have been just as easy, but Tony insisted that Peter wouldn’t learn unless people interacted with him. The fact that he no longer looked like a machine helped it seem more normal, but not by much.

“Several. I think the one that just arrived is the microwave.”

“Why did Tony order a microwave?”

“To replace the one in the lab’s kitchenette.”

“And what happened to the old microwave?” she asked with a sigh, already knowing she would regret posing the question.

“Dum-E broke it trying to put out the fire.”

Pepper opened her mouth to ask before shaking her head. No, she really _didn’t_ want to know.

“If Tony asks, tell him I’ll have someone bring it down later.”

“Sure, Ms Potts. No problem.”

Pepper stared at the LMD as he swung his legs and stared off into space. How many teenagers had she seen on buses in the past that looked exactly like the machine before her did now? Would she be able to differentiate between them if she tried?

These were dilemmas she enjoyed mulling over in the safety of her own living room, with a bowl of popcorn perched on her knee and a second rate sci-fi horror playing on low volume.

They were not, however, questions she expected to be faced with in her place of work, where consequences were more than just distant hypotheticals.

“You’re not planning on taking over the world any time soon, are you Peter?”

Confusion flashed across his face and she wondered when Tony found the time to program that particular expression.

“I have nothing in the schedule, Miss Potts,” he replied, sounding confused. She couldn’t help but laugh.

“_May I ask that you avoid giving our newest addition any bright ideas, Miss Potts_.”

“Sorry, JARVIS.”

xxx

Tony continued to work on Peter long after Obie had the LMD project officially scrapped. Still without a mobile power supply, he dedicated a corner of the workshop to the prototype where he could sit and observe without leaving the power dock.

He designed the AI to be adaptable. Even without access to the outside world, it continued to learn and grow from the surrounding stimuli. JARVIS stayed in near constant communication with it, monitoring as it grew and evolved. Though always prone to voicing his thoughts aloud, Tony talked to himself in the lab a lot more now.

With Obie moving up the timetable, Tony found little time to make modifications to the LMD. Designing a new battery would have been all but impossible, so he threw himself into weapons manufacturing in the hopes that Obie would loosen the noose around his neck after they demonstrated the first prototype.

While most of the bots were unphased by Peter’s presence in the lab, Dum-E seemed fascinated. It didn’t matter how many time Tony shooed him away, he always crept back over to get a closer look. Though the first few times he elicited no response, on the fourth attempt he got close enough to trigger an automated response. Peter looked up in surprise and smiled at the bot, only to frown in concentration when he responded by shooting backwards across the lab and spinning in circles.

“Dum-E has a few quirks,” Tony said without looking away from the simulations.

“He is…broken?”

“Not at all. He’s the first bot I ever built. Unfortunately, I was not only an inexperienced teenager but also very drunk at the time. Miracle I got him working, if I’m being honest. I could have gone back and rewritten the code but…” Tony gave a noncommittal sort of shrug. “I think I like him the way he is.”

Peter blinked as he processed this information. It was a new function; it took Tony a while to get the timing of it just right.

“Dum-E has…sentimental value,” he clarified.

Tony paused, turning to watch the LMD this time. “Yeah, I suppose he does.”

Peter nodded. The movement came out a little too jerky and Tony made a mental note to fix it when he found the time. When he didn’t offer a follow-up question, Tony turned away.

“What are you doing?”

“Hm?”

“Right now. What are you doing?”

“Just running some simulations to test a weapon I’m designing.”

“Oh.”

Another beat passed.

“What kind of weapon?”

Perhaps the questions shouldn’t have caught Tony off-guard. After all, he didn’t build the LMD to fill a set role as he did with JARVIS. The bots were plenty curious when he first built them. They _had_ to be for the AI to learn and evolve on its own.

So, while it would have been easy to dismiss the LMD’s questions, instead he rotated the display to face the LMD.

Peter’s brow furrowed as he processed the data.

“I don’t have access to these schematics,” he commented.

“That’s because you’re on my private server. This is a Stark Industries project.”

“Why am I restricted from accessing the Stark Industries servers?”

“You sure like to ask questions, don’t you?”

“I can stop if you want me to.”

“No, it’s alright. Certain…well placed people in the company don’t really like the idea of my untested AIs poking around secure files. It took a lot of trial and error before I was able to convince them to allow JARVIS control over company files.”

“And I am a prototype,” Peter said, nodding in understanding.

“You’d only be a prototype if I made more,” Tony corrected. “Seeing as how Obie scrapped the project, it looks like you might just be an original model.”

Peter stared at him with a blank expression.

With a sigh, Tony turned back to his designs.

“Tell you what, kiddo. Let me finish up with the preparations for this demonstration. I should have more time to review your progress after this is over. Then we’ll talk about expanding your access, yeah?”

xxx

It was amazing how quickly the LMD became a normal part of life.

He watched Tony work in the lab, free to interact with JARVIS and browse online to pass the time. Tony worked on him between projects, removing glitches and implementing subtle improvements as he saw fit. Every interaction seemed smoother than the last, every expression more genuine. Pauses in conversation grew shorter and laughter grew more frequent.

But without a sustainable power source, they could only progress so far before stalling.

They never stopped; it was important to say. Tony fixed problems as they arose, Peter continued to consume information at a rapid rate, but they fell into patterns. The LMD couldn’t be a priority, not with the complete lack of company interest. The power source shifted to the back burner and simmered there for the better part of a year, the LMD melting into the background until his presence became as fixed as any of Tony’s bots. He didn’t really _need_ to leave anyway, did he? Without company backing, Peter had no set purpose. No place to go, no set things to learn. Tony focused his efforts on designing weapons and the issue fell to the back of his mind until it hardly occurred at all.

For over a year, they continued in this comfortable routine. Even Pepper adjusted to Peter’s presence. He got the sense that Obie didn’t really like him, but the man hardly spent much time in Tony’s lab to begin with.

Tony began the designs for the Jericho and his free time became all but non-existent.

_His crowning achievement_ as Obie had taken to calling it. He’d be lying if he claimed not to feel even a small amount of pride.

Still, he wasn’t sure why _he_ had to handle the investors for this one.

“I’ll be back in a day, maybe two,” he assured all of his bots as he switched off the monitors. “JARVIS, you’ll hold down the fort, won’t you?”

“_Always, sir_.”

Tony hummed, almost tripping over a fretting Dum-E as he made his way across the lab. Peter raised his head when Tony entered his response range.

“I’m going to have a lot more free time once this demonstration is done,” he vowed, more to himself than to the LMD. Peter’s face lit up in a way that made Tony’s heart ache, even if he knew damn well it was an automated response. “You’ll have JARVIS to keep you company, just don’t burn the place down.”

“I’ll keep watch of the lab while you’re gone,” the LMD vowed.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Tony said with a smile and ruffled Peter’s hair. It took a lot of effort to get the texture of it just right.

The LMD watched Tony go with a smile, waving as he left the lab even if the billionaire had his back turned. With nothing else to do, he returned to his default positioning and waited, unseeing eyes staring at the wall ahead of him.

And he waited.

And he waited.

And he waited.

(Tony wasn’t home in two days.)


	2. Peppermint Tea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The house is quiet when Tony's gone, but Pepper wouldn't call it empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, I decided to continue this bizarre fic. Thank you all for the wonderful comments on the first chapter.  
Also, would you guess it, this fic is still inspired by a (much better) series? Just sayin, you can still go read that [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/993537) if you haven't yet ;)
> 
> Happy Halloween, folks!

Pepper wasn’t sure what led her to the lab that night.

She got the call from Rhodey before the story even hit the news. A targeted attack on Tony’s car, four troops dead from his car, more from the one in front, no sign of Tony.

No sign of a body either, though it came as a cold sort of comfort.

_He might still be alive, Pep…but there’s no way of telling what kind of state he’ll be in if we find him_.

If.

That word stuck out to her above all else. Rhodey, who she knew would search day and night for as long as it took to find him...Rhodey the realist, the one with the experience in this field. The one who dealt with these kinds of situations all the time, the one who _handled_ impossible situations for a living.

_If_.

She didn’t allow herself time to consider the long-term consequences, no matter how pressing questions of unemployment – of her _future_ – seemed.

Tony would come back. He’d disappeared before, scared the hell out of all of them, but he _always_ turned up eventually.

Rhodey always brought him home.

_If_.

She was rational on the phone. First with Rhodey, then with Obadiah. There were arrangements to be made, procedures to follow. She cancelled all of his immediate appointments, placed any perishable deliveries on hold, updated security at the house. Once her phone started ringing, it didn’t stop.

At some point in the mess, she got in her car and didn’t stop driving. She knew it probably wasn’t the best idea, that she was likely in shock. The destination didn’t seem important until she pulled into the driveway of the Malibu house, more on instinct than by conscious choice.

The house almost always seemed quiet, so far removed from outside distractions. Tonight, the silence pressed down on her, making the rooms seem too large and the air too thin. Even as JARVIS switched on the lights, it did nothing to combat the oppressive darkness outside the windows.

The house should be light, noisy. Most importantly, Tony should be in it.

With every right to be there, Pepper had no reason to sneak through the house like a thief. No reason to slip off her shoes because she couldn’t stand the sound of her own heels clicking on the hard floors.

She hated the silence, but when the house felt like a funeral parlour it seemed disrespectful to break it.

JARVIS didn’t question her presence in the house, not even when she descended the steps to Tony’s private lab.

It felt wrong not to be greeted by deafening heavy metal music, to be in the room without him working on one of his cars or mapping out designs at the holotable.

Dum-E rolled across the lab to greet her when he sensed the door opening, visibly wilting when he found her instead of Tony.

“You and me both,” she murmured before crouching down to regard the bot at what would be eye level if Dum-E had eyes to speak of. The bot perked up at the attention.

_Could the bots comprehend the concept of Tony’s death?_ She hoped for everyone’s sake that Tony thought that far ahead, but he’d been so reluctant to draft his will…

“JARVIS?” she asked, her voice sounding hoarse all of a sudden. “Can I ask…Did Tony…If he…Did he have any…”

The words refused to form, the idea so incomprehensible.

Putting it into words, speaking it aloud in Tony’s own lab…that would make it real. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to make similar phone calls on Tony’s behalf – cancelling appointments, rescheduling deliveries, calling lawyers. She could almost convince herself he’d just gotten himself into yet another HR disaster. Maybe he’d relapsed, gotten caught with something stronger than alcohol. Maybe the tabloids would rip him to shreds like last time, maybe she’d be the one to handle a furious Obadiah when he showed up on their doorstep after Tony made bail.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“_I’m sorry, Miss Potts. I’m not sure what you’re asking me_.”

She closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe and, “did Tony have a contingency plan for you and the bots?”

JARVIS paused and she prayed he would understand.

_Please don’t make me say it out loud. Not here, not in front of Dum-E and U. Not _yet.

“_Yes, Miss Potts_,” JARVIS replied after a moment. His electronic voice sounded strangely soft. “_Tony updated his will and testament to contain very specific instructions regarding what should happen to his personally owned creations upon his death…And the bots in this lab, myself included, have protocols in place for when it happens. I believe he mentioned not wanting to leave the burden of trying to explain his passing on your shoulders._”

Despite holding it together so well up until this point, tears began to leak from her eyes. She hastily moved to wipe them away, succeeding only in drawing a great black smear of mascara across her hand.

“_However,_” JARVIS added with a note of hesitance. “_His last will and testament was drafted a little over two years ago._”

Her head felt stuffy, her thoughts slow. “What does that mean, JARVIS?”

“_It contains no reference to the LMD._”

At the mention of Tony’s most recent creation, her eyes gravitated to the rarely used corner of the lab now devoted to the project. Amazing how something that usually creeped her out could now be overlooked, forgotten.

The LMD sat slouched forward, eyes fixed on a spot on the floor.

If not for the unnatural stillness, she wouldn’t have guessed he was anything short of human.

Pepper tried to remember if she’d ever interacted the LMD without Tony in the room and felt an irrational spike of fear that she might break it somehow. Oh God, she didn’t know if she’d be able to handle that. Just the thought of breaking Tony’s greatest creation when he wasn’t around to fix it…

“Peter?” she whispered, half-hoping he wouldn’t respond. The LMD raised his head in a smooth motion, as natural as any person. She expected some sort of pause as he transitioned from stand-by to active, but he responded as if he’d been lost deep in thought.

“Miss Potts,” he said with a grin. “I wasn’t expecting to see you in the lab again so soon. Didn’t you say you’d be working from home while Mr Stark is away for the weapons demonstration in Afghanistan?”

God, he got more human every day.

She scrambled to her feet, offering Dum-E assurances when he startled at the sudden movement. Words failed her once again as she struggled to find an explanation.

“_Miss Potts,_” JARVIS interrupted. “_If I may, I believe the news cycles have picked up a story that may be…relevant._”

Her mouth went dry.

“Turn it on, JARVIS.”

The monitors in the centre of the lab came alive.

“_-ch parties for the missing billionaire are expected to continue straight through the night, but many officials are not optimistic about the outcome. All we can say for sure is we have confirmation that all of the deceased have been accounted and Stark is _not_ among them. Tell us a little about the attack itself, John_.”

Pepper moved closer; eyes fixed on the screens as the camera switched to an onsite reporter. Even in the darkness she could make out the helicopters overhead.

“_Thank you, Lisa_,” he said after a lengthy pause. “_While there’s still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the whole thing, authorities are very clear on one thing in particular: this attack is believed to have been orchestrated specifically to target Tony Stark. It is thought that his security detail was ambushed following the Stark Industries weapons demonstration, the details of which are not currently public. We have confirmed reports of no less than eight dead at the scene, but that number may still change._”

“_We received no reports of any wounded, though. Is that correct?_”

“_It looks like the foreign assailants returned after the initial attack, seemingly for the specific purpose of making sure there were no survivors at the scene. No one has come forth to take credit for the incident as of yet, but we have received word that the US is investigating a local terrorist cell in connection with the attack._”

“_Do you think there’s any hope of them bringing Stark back home in one piece_?”

Pepper stopped breathing as the journalist grimaced.

“_We have been assured that this is currently a top priority and that every measure possible will be taken to ensure we get him home._”

“_Thank you for that, John. I’m sure everyone is glad to hear that. For those interested, the president is expected to make a speech_-”

But Pepper wasn’t interested. All she cared about was how uncomfortable the simple question made the reporter on the ground.

_Will he come back home?_

She hated him for ignoring the part about bringing him back in one piece.

JARVIS muted the broadcast when she let out a choked sob, leaving the headline _Stark Industries CEO Missing in Afghanistan_ flashing in front of her eyes.

Something touched her shoulder and it took every ounce of her restraint not to scream.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

She turned to find the LMD standing behind her, hand half-raised as if unsure of quite what to do with it. Something artificial had no right to move as quietly as he did. In all the months Tony had been working on him down here, she’d never even seen him stand.

Now here he was, standing in front of her…the charging dock on the other side of the room.

“Miss Potts,” the LMD asked. “Are you alright?”

Heart still pounding, she forced herself to nod.

“But…you’re crying,” he pointed out, tilting his head with an expression of confusion on his face. So perfect, so _human_.

_Tony made this._

Between ragged breaths she forced herself to smile. “I’ll be alright.”

The LMD’s brow furrowed, chocolate brown eyes leaving hers’ to examine the screens.

“Mr Stark is missing.”

“…Yes.”

“They don’t know if he’s alive.”

She closed her eyes, the words sinking in like a death sentence.

“Yes,” she said because it seemed like the easiest thing to say right now.

Peter tilted his head as he processed the information before offering a simple nod. No fussing, no follow up questions. His creator was missing in action, everything he’d ever known thrown into jeopardy, and he didn’t have a thing to say about it.

_Looks human_, Pepper reminded herself, _but he’s still just a machine._

Peter’s eyes flickered back to the screens behind her and for a heart wrenching moment she expected a different headline. One that read _Tony Stark found dead_ instead of missing.

Everything looked the same. Same journalists, same news being repeated over and over again. She didn’t need sound this time to know they were talking in circles.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Potts?”

Blinking back more unshed tears, she shook her head. Instead of taking this as his cue to leave, the LMD lingered.

“You’re still upset.”

Pepper tried not to snap, remembering everything Tony told her about developmental processes. _Knowing_ that, if Tony were here, he’d answer every question the LMD put forward with a patience he scarcely offered to human beings. “Yes.”

“Because of the news?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you watch it?”

She counted to ten in her head before replying. “Sometimes not knowing is worse. Watching it…watching it makes me sad, but at least I _know_. I _know_ they haven’t found a body yet. I know Tony might still be out there…I know there’s hope.”

Peter frowned again, looking back and forth between Pepper and the screen.

“May I watch it with you?”

She blinked. “You want to…watch the news?”

He shrugged. She didn’t know he _could_ shrug. God, what she wouldn’t give to know what Tony put in that mechanical brain. Was this just a learning experience? Did he ever watch TV with Tony during the long hours spent working in the lab?

“Okay,” the word slipped from numb lips. She couldn’t really remember coming to a decision; exhaustion kept her from caring.

Pepper pushed her chair back to make room for a second, but the LMD made no move to pull up a spare seat. It occurred to her that he probably didn’t _need_ one. He couldn’t get tired or comfortable. Maybe Tony just left him sitting on the workbench out of habit.

Leaning back in her seat, she could see the thick power cords trailing along the floor towards the charging dock. If she leaned back further in her chair, she could see where they looped and disappeared under the hem of Peter’s shirt.

Still reliant on the charging dock, then; just with a longer leash.

“Do you like living in the lab?” The question slipped out without conscious reasoning or logic behind it. There were more important things to fixate on now, with Tony’s life hanging in the balance.

“I suppose,” Peter replied, a note of uncertainty lacing his words. “I’ve never known anything else.”

It was a more genuine response than Pepper ever expected to receive from a machine.

“_Can_ you like things? I mean…did Tony design you to have preferences?”

“In a way.”

The LMD didn’t elaborate and Pepper didn’t pry. Upon request, JARVIS unmuted the monitors.

Expert after supposed expert offered their opinions on what might have happened. On potential motives for an attack, on reasons why they might have kidnapped him, on reasons why they might have killed him and moved the body elsewhere. She listened to them debate whether the American government could or should give in to ransom demands they may never receive. Pepper managed to hold back her tears this time.

The LMD didn’t leave.

xxx

The weeks that followed were without a doubt the worst of Pepper’s life. It rushed by in an endless cycle of answering calls and reapplying makeup in the hopes that it might hide her blotchy skin and bloodshot eyes. She received calls from government agencies asking all kinds of questions about Tony (_if anybody has that kind of information, it’s Pepper. She handles all of Tony’s affairs_). She answered the questions that seemed appropriate as best she could, only refusing when they went on to ask about current projects Tony was working on (not that she knew many details).

The calls she loathed above all others were the one she received from board members. The first few weren't overly concerning. Apologetic requests for status updates on incomplete projects that hadn't been backed up on the Stark Industries servers mostly. However, as days dragged into weeks with still no sign of Tony, other requests began to filter through. Private projects, unsubmitted concept designs, even personal files.

As time went on, her patience wore thin and she began to remind them that everything Tony wanted them to see was on the company servers. If they wanted the rest, they could come back with a warrant.

She answered calls from concerned exes (of which Tony had quite a few), and from dozens of media outlets seeking more information (on the kidnapping, on Tony, on whether his absence left a gap in the lives of his friends when he had no immediate family to speak of).

Then there were the other callers.

She didn’t know where half of them even found their contact information number (okay, so maybe he wasn’t as careful about handing it out as he <strike>could</strike> should have been).

There were the hoax calls about Tony being found safely. There were the hoax calls about Tony being found dead. The calls from supposed long lost relatives, curious about how long they’d have to wait before they read his will. The calls from people who felt it their moral obligation to rant at length about how he deserved everything those terrorists could possibly inflict upon him.

JARVIS blocked the numbers at her request, but she still refused to let him bring the full security measures back online.

Pepper wouldn’t risk missing something important, not now. Instead, she did her job.

Strange how the area of the house she associated with Tony most of all had become her safe haven. At least with the bots it didn’t feel so empty, she could almost convince herself Tony would emerge from the kitchenette at any moment with a coffee mug in his hand.

“Pepper,” Peter said, distracting her from her thoughts. “I finished filling out the forms you requested.”

She looked up from the email she’d been attempting to write to Rhodey for the last ten minutes to skim the information on the nearest monitor. She knew most of Tony’s personal information off by heart (she _had_ to as his personal assistant), but Peter volunteered. Having access to JARVIS made him more than qualified to fill out a few basic forms.

“Thanks, Peter,” she said with a forced smile. “Everything looks perfect, you mind submitting it for me?”

“Of course.”

She returned her attention to her phone, biting her lip as she tried to think of what to say. Ever since the day he went missing, Rhodey had made a point of sending her personal updates on the search and rescue efforts. He couldn’t include any specifics about their location or describe any details of the measures they were taking. The reports more or less amounted to “we still haven’t found him, but damn if we’re not giving it our all.”

It probably still violated all kinds of security protocols. Pepper didn’t know how she’d thank him for it when all this was over <strike>assuming this nightmare had an end.</strike> The right words continued to escape her, but she managed to cobble together a grateful response.

_One email down. Just another…what? Hundred and ten to go?_

Her stomach dropped when she looked up to find the lab empty.

“Peter?” she asked, trying to suppress full blown panic because _what the actual fu-_

“_There is no need to be alarmed, Miss Potts. The LMD has not left the confines of the lab,_” JARVIS assured her.

Frowning, she peered over the edge of the desk until she could see the cables dragging along the floor, leading off to the small kitchenette attached to the lab.

Making a mental note to find out what the LMD’s range was, Pepper set out to trace his footsteps.

“Hey, Peter? What are you doing?” she asked as she peered around the edge of the doorframe.

“Making tea.”

Over the last few days, Pepper noticed that Peter had a habit of answering questions without really explaining himself. In a human, she might describe the behaviour as evasive, but she suspected he didn’t always grasp that people couldn’t always follow his line of thinking.

“I can see that. Any reason why?”

“You said you don’t drink coffee. My research indicates that tea is a popular alternative. JARVIS told me you often drink it when you’re working long hours…unless you’d prefer something else?”

She blinked.

“I’d love some tea. That’s very…thoughtful, Peter,” she said and tried not to think too hard about the fact that Tony’s AI keeps records of her drink preferences.

“I added some cold water. Sources indicate that this is a good way of reducing the temperature to make it drinkable more quickly.” He took great care in placing the mug down on the counter in front of her and waited as if to gauge her response.

Pepper made a point of taking a sip.

“It’s peppermint,” she noted.

“I read that it can help to alleviate stress.” Peter inclined his head. “Do you not like peppermint? I can make you something else if you prefer.”

“It’s perfect,” she said and found it didn’t take as much of an effort as she’d grown to expect to force a smile.

Offerings began to show up around the lab on a near daily basis after that. Over the years, she’d added various varieties of tea to the grocery lists in the hopes that Tony might branch out and drink something other than coffee and alcohol. Needless to say, she found little success in this area.

However, while Tony never actually _drank_ the tea, he’d apparently never made any effort to get rid of it either.

Cups containing varieties of tea she didn’t know existed, let alone remembered buying, found their way into her hands when she was distracted. Chilled glasses of water waited for her when she returned from running errands on days, reminding her she’d forgotten to drink anything all day.

On one especially stressful day, she missed lunch entirely and found a bewildered delivery man from Tony’s favourite pizza place on the doorstep.

She left him a sizeable tip and didn’t skip lunch again.

“You don’t have to take care of me,” she reminded the LMD one day as she accepted yet another mug of tea, taking a sip without hesitation. Apple and cinnamon this time, he’d been experimenting again.

“Continuous stress is bad for the human body,” he commented. “Studies indicate it increases risk of mental illness, elevates blood pressure, encourages addictive behaviours such as smoking and drinking, and may be linked to an increased risk of lung disease, cancer, cirrhosis of-“

“I’m not dying,” she deadpanned.

Peter halted, unused to being interrupted mid-sentence. It took him longer than usual to come up with a response.

“I know that,” he said at last before his brow furrowed in confusion. “Have you eaten anything today?”

Pepper sighed.

(She still came back to the lab the next day. And the next. And the next.)

xxx

“Hey, Dum-E. Can you pass the egg fried rice?”

The bot perked up at the sound of his name, whirring in excitement at being given a task. Under Peter’s advisement, he retrieved the box from the stack and dropped it on the counter in front of her like an over-excited Labrador.

“Thanks,” she said between mouthfuls. God, she hadn’t realised how hungry she was.

“_Would you like me to play something from the archives?_”

“Please.”

“_Anything in particular?_”

“Surprise me.”

She only half-listened to the movie, browsing her emails on her phone as she ate. Most of them went ignored, but she deleted a few emails from funeral homes and skimmed through the ones that actually looked important. Keeping busy was essential these days.

“_Miss Potts_,” JARVIS said with an urgency she’d never heard from the AI before, “_I strongly recommend switching to a news network._”

The words sank in, making the world around her seem oh so very small.

_This can’t be happening_. The out-of-place thought flitted through her mind, along with images of headlines. _Missing Billionaire Killed in Terrorist Attack, Weapons Developer Found Deceased, Stark Empire in Mourning as Son of Founder is Confirmed Dead._

“Switch it over,” she said in a voice little louder than a whisper.

“_-issing billionaire was found wandering the desert after reports of an explosion. The details are still being confirmed, but the current reports suggest the weapons developer was able to escape his captors after building some sort of device. There are rumours circulating that he was injured when he was found, but the nature and extent of these injuries are yet to be verified by official sources._”

Pepper didn’t notice her phone ringing until Peter placed a hand on her shoulder, the light touch almost making her jump out of her skin whilst simultaneously grounding her in place.

“It’s Colonel Rhodes,” he said, holding out her phone.

Snapping out of her daze, she put the call on speaker.

“Rhodey,” she breathed.

“_Pep, he’s alive. I don’t know how, but that stubborn son of a bitch made it out of there in one piece._”

Pepper had shed more tears in the last three months than she could remember shedding in the rest of her life put together. The way the situation dragged out, offered hope and snatched it away. The uncertainty, the waiting, the endless lists and pressuring phone calls; she wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.

She’d long since grown tired of crying, but fresh tears welled in her eyes at the sound of the words she’d been dreaming of hearing since that first day.

“He’s- he’s coming home? The news said…Is he okay?”

“_There’s a lot to unpack,_” Rhodey said grimly. “_But yeah, he’s coming home, Pep_.”

xxx

“Happy, I need you to get the car.”

“_Ungh, Pepper what time is it?_”

“About four, how soon can you be here to pick me up?”

“_AM? You’re joking, Pep!_”

“Haven’t you been following the news? Tony’s coming home. We need to pick him up from the airbase.”

A loud clatter followed by a series of curses told her that Happy had _not_ been following the news since last night.

“_He _what?” Happy all but squawked when he retrieved his phone.

“It was a kidnapping after all. He managed to escape from his captors, God only knows how…Rhodey said he wouldn’t say all that much about it, just enough to get the military off his back.”

“_Jesus._”

“It’s going to be a rough ride, Hap…We have to be there to pick him up when his plane gets in.”

“_I’ll be there in half an hour. When’s his plane getting in?_”

She let out a shaky laugh of what felt like relief. “We’ve got time, Happy…He’s coming _home_.”

xxx

“_Few tears for your long lost boss?_”

“_Tears of joy. I hate job hunting._”

xxx

Everything looked the same.

Tony didn’t know what he’d been expecting. He was happy to hear that he hadn’t been declared dead in those three months. From time to time during those sweltering days in the cave or when the pain in his chest kept him up long into the night, he’d think about his house in Malibu.

Pretty much everything he owned would be left to Obadiah, he was the closest thing to family Tony had left. Would he sell it? Have it torn down? Turn it into a second home?

He ran his hand over the cabinet and found not so much as a speck of dust. Pepper must have asked the cleaners back, but was it before or after she found out Tony was still alive? Did his house sit empty the whole time he was gone?

No, not empty. Not quite.

“Miss me, Jar?”

“_It’s wonderful to have you back, sir_.”

He opened his mouth to make a joke about the AI being a sap, but the words died on his tongue. No, he rather preferred the sincerity for once. For three months, he wondered if he’d ever hear the AI’s voice again.

Three months in captivity, but in the mansion time stood still.

Maybe if he stepped out onto the balcony, he could convince himself no time had passed. Maybe the tangy taste of salt flavouring the air would wash away the memory of grit in his mouth and sand between his teeth. Maybe if he drove down to the water’s edge he could-

But no, he had no desire to feel the sand between his toes again. The thought of ocean water splashing against his face made him feel ill.

The last three months may not have touched the house, but they’d been an eternity to Tony.

“Are the bots still running?”

“_The lab is as you left it, sir._”

Tony nodded, savouring every step. He’d never admit how surreal it felt to be back home after all this time. Not to Pepper, not to Rhodey, and certainly not to Obadiah.

If Dum-E had a tail, he would have been wagging it furiously when Tony entered the lab.

“Hey, bud. Long time, no see? What, MIT’s robotics lab return you when they found out I hadn’t snuffed it?”

The bot whirred, running laps around Tony in dizzying circles. U and Butterfingers approached with interest soon after, regarding Tony warily as if half expecting him to disappear.

“Mr Stark?”

Tony looked up to find the LMD standing in the doorway of the kitchenette. His face went slack for a moment before breaking into an easy grin. “You’re back!”

“Sure am, kid. How have you- _oof_!”

Before Tony could fully process what was happening, the LMD crossed the lab and trapped him in a very careful hug.

He gave the LMD an awkward pat on the back, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. “I don’t remember programming you to do this, you learn a few new tricks while I was gone?”

“Pepper told me you’d need a hug when you got back,” he said, sounding perfectly at ease as he pulled back to study him. Tony swallowed back the lump in his throat, fiddling with the cuff of his jacket.

“Well, a little warning next time. Alright, buddy?”

The LMD blinked. “Of course, Mr Stark.”

“You’ve been spending time with Pepper, then?” he asked as he smoothed out his shirt. The LMD’s head bobbed in a vigorous nod (maybe too vigorous, he should fix that when he found the time).

“She came down here most days while you were gone.”

_That_ got his attention. “Is that so?”

“I made lots of tea,” the LMD said proudly.

“Uh huh.”

It took quite a bit to distract the LMD, but Tony could see it when he dismissed his line of thinking in favour of something new. Something that took priority.

His brow furrowed, face morphing into a familiar expression of concentration Tony thought he’d never live to see again. His eyes scanned Tony again, this time looking for something precise, before settling on his chest.

“I was wondering if you’d be able to pick up on this,” he commented, tapping the arc reactor through his shirt. “That’s what’s throwing you off, right? The magnets?”

Peter cocked his head like a bird. “What _is_ it?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Tony said with a lopsided grin. “If I’m not mistaken, and I rarely am, _this_ is the answer to your power problem.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright everybody, you know the drill. Comment to let me know your thoughts on all of *gestures wildly* this. You guys like the chapter length? I know it’s not as long as the opening chapter but 5k seemed like a decent size, both in terms of me writing it and you guys reading it. If you prefer it longer, lemme know that too and I’ll do my best to accommodate. I dunno if I was all that happy with how this chapter turned out, but hopefully the next will be better.
> 
> Hard to say how often I’ll be able to update this. I’ll certainly try my best.


	3. Nightcap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes change isn't always a bad thing...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I jumped around a little more than usual in this one. I’m trying really hard not to just rewrite the first Iron Man movie.  
Also, we passed a hundred kudos on this insane little fic!!! You guys have been OVERWHELMINGLY supportive in all your comments. I honestly can’t say that enough.  
Oh yeah, can't believe I almost forgot! Please go read the amazing [series that inspired this one.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/993537) by Footloose_Poets!  
<del>I really hope they don't mind I wrote this fic inspired by their work without waiting for a reply</del>
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

When Tony asked Pepper to give him a hand with something in the lab, she definitely didn’t anticipate him asking her to remove the device keeping him _alive_. It was revolting and probably took at least a decade off her life, but at the very least she could say it didn’t take too long. Tony stood up, looking far too casual for a man who’d just gone into _cardiac arrest_ a few moments.

Once her own heart stopped racing, it became harder to shake the sense that something was _missing_.

“Hey, Tony…why didn’t you just ask Peter to help with this instead of me?” A surge of dread struck her when he froze. “You didn’t…_do_ something to him, did you?”

“He’ll be fine,” he assured her, wincing when he caught sight of her expression.

“Implying he’s _not_ fine _now_.”

“He’s…indisposed? I’m making a few modifications. He’ll be back up on his feet in no time.”

“You promise?”

“When did you get so attached?” he asked curiously. “I thought he freaked you out.”

“He _surprised_ me,” she corrected. “He’s decent company now he doesn’t look like a terminator. Helped me get through the mountains of paperwork while you were…”

“Being held captive by terrorists?” he suggested, rolling his eyes when she winced. “You can say it, Pep. I’m not gonna lose it.”

Her lips pressed into a fine line, no doubt biting back a retort.

“You’ll get him up and running again?”

“I promise,” he vowed. “You’ll hardly be able to tell the difference.”

xxx

“How does it feel, kiddo?”

Peter flexed his fingers, a visual cue to indicate his internal sensors were running diagnostics.

“The new power source is stable,” he decided.

“You want to try standing?”

In one swift movement, he sat up and slid off the table. The arc reactor in his chest mirrored Tony’s own, the soft glow reflecting off his metal chest plate.

“Here,” he offered. The LMD didn’t hesitate to accept the plain black t-shirt (that was a good indication, no delays in his response time). The thick fabric did a decent job at hiding the bulky apparatus. If you knew to look, you could only just pick up on the faint blue glow through the black.

“Levels still holding steady?”

“All systems are operating well within the parameters.”

“Good, we’ve got work to do.”

“A new project?”

“Sort of. We’re not building weapons anymore, though. I put a stop to that.”

“So…what will you build now?”

“I’ve got a few ideas.”

xxx

“Hi, Miss Potts!”

Pepper didn’t like to think of herself as jumpy, but she’d be lying if she claimed she didn’t shriek. The voice was one she knew all-too well, but in three months of practically living out of the house, she’d never heard it _outside of the lab_.

Twisting around in a rather inelegant spin (thank you, high heels), she found the LMD taking stock in the kitchen.

“Would you like some tea?” he asked, oblivious to her state of complete shock.

“Peter,” she breathed. “How are you…What about your charging dock?”

Surprise flickered across his face, as if he never imagined she _wouldn’t_ know.

“Mr Stark fixed me. I can walk around unimpeded now.”

“I can…see that.”

Pepper resisted the urge to massage her temples and forced a smile. “That’s wonderful, Peter. How are you enjoying life outside the lab?”

He blinked. “There are windows up here.”

“Is that so?”

He nodded before returning his attention to the kitchen, poking through the drawers as if fascinated by their contents. Pepper smiled fondly before something occurred that made her falter.

“Hey, Pete?”

“Mhm?”

“Where’s Tony?”

He tilted his head without straightening up, making him look strangely lopsided as he studied the food processor in one of the open cupboards. “He locked himself in the lab and asked that he not be disturbed until his takeout arrived, but JARVIS says Happy pulled into the driveway with his order a few minutes ago. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind you interrupting.”

Pepper froze. “…Happy?”

“Hey, Pep!”

_Speak of the devil_.

Happy jogged across the open expanse of the living room to greet her. “I’m not staying long, just came to drop something off with Tony…I know I’m not really in a place to say anything _definitive_, but he seems kind of like he’s doing better today, y’know?”

“Happy.”

“I know what you’re going to say, I know he’s been to hell and back. But maybe it’s a sign he’s beginning to recover? That he’s ready to heal? Maybe even reopen-”

“Happy!”

“What…? _Oh_.”

Peter stared at Happy with the unabashed curiosity of a scientist unearthing a fascinating new specimen.

“Um, hi?”

“Hi, Happy!” he said in a jovial tone that didn’t quite match the intensity of his expression.

Happy shifted, fixing Pepper with a desperate look.

“So, uh, who are you exactly?”

He blinked. “I’m Peter.”

“Nice to meet you, Peter, but that doesn’t really answer my question.”

Pepper resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “Happy…”

Before she could figure out how on Earth to finish that sentence, Peter spoke up.

“I’m the LMD,” he said, cocking his head as if waiting for a look of recognition. It seemed Pepper wasn’t the only one to assume Tony would have mentioned _building a functioning android in his basement_ to his driver and close personal friend.

Happy’s frown deepened. “That some sort of intern?”

“Sure,” Tony piped in as he bypassed the awkward standoff and made a beeline for the coffee maker. “Why not? You put on a new pot kid?”

“I was letting it brew,” he said, his attention leaving Happy the second Tony came into view. “You complained it wasn’t strong enough last time.”

Tony poured himself a cup and took a sip, humming in approval. “Perfect.”

“When did you get an intern?” Happy asked with a frown

“Before the abduction.” Tony shrugged and took another sip from his coffee cup. “He was working on something of a…trial basis, if you will. We only worked out all the finer details this morning.”

“Oh…” Happy said, shooting Peter a dubious look. “Well, uh. In that case, nice to meet you, kid.”

He held out a hand to shake.

Peter blinked twice and tilted his head, uncomprehending. Pepper suppressed a groan.

“Handshake, kid,” Tony theatre whispered, and the expression of confusion lifted into an easy grin.

“Nice to meet you too, Happy!” he said as he shook the drivers hand with a little too much enthusiasm.

The driver shot the trio strange looks over his shoulder as he left, shaking his head and muttering something about Tony’s recruitment standards.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d say that went quite well.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Tony,” Pepper warned. “Why’d you lie?”

He shrugged. “Not my fault Happy stumbled into the perfect cover story.”

“Not your- Tony, why do you _need_ a cover story?”

The smile faltered.

Getting Tony to take _anything_ seriously was a challenge. The almost grim expression looked out of place on his face. It made him look drawn…_tired_.

“Hey, Jar? Happy out of the house, yet?”

“_Just leaving now, sir. Would you like me to ask him to come back?_”

“No, that won’t be necessary. Peter, show Pepper your new modifications.”

Without hesitation, the LMD pulled his shirt over his head.

She’d seen his torso before, but it still served as an uncomfortable reminder of his true nature. The synthetic skin ended a little below his artificial collar bones, revealing the metal shielding of his torso. A new addition to the harsh metal was an arc reactor, almost identical to the one she now knew sat in a cavity in Tony’s sternum.

“That’s how you fixed the power problem,” she said, feeling stupid for not realising it before. “You…gave him the device you built to save your life.”

“Normally I would have drawn up some new specs first, but I got impatient. I already had to build this one,” he said, tapping the arc reactor in his own chest for emphasis. “I figured, why not one more? Maybe I’ll figure out a way to make it more functional for him, a little more discrete? Not much point in fiddling with mine too much, I’ve already got the apparatus built into my chest.”

“I like it,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. He raised an eyebrow, a teasing smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It suits him…The LMD, that is.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind, Miss Potts.”

She’d waited three long months to see that lopsided grin again, it was almost enough to make her forget her original question.

Almost.

“So, how come you have to hide the fact that Peter has an arc reactor?”

Tony hesitated. “Do you trust me, Pep?”

The question caught her off guard. Again with the sudden shifts between humorous and serious. Dismissive of everything one minute and oh so genuine the next. Tony always had a one-track mind; she couldn’t help but wonder what might have grabbed his attention over the last few months.

She still didn’t have to consider her answer. “Of course.”

“Good, because you’re one of the only people left I _know_ I can trust. I don’t understand a lot of it myself, but I know that if the arc reactor tech gets into the wrong hands…it could do a lot of damage, Pep. Maybe more than anything else I’ve ever built before. It won’t take a lot to put two and two together if I suddenly announce I got the LMD up and running. And, if I’m right…I don’t think the people I’m looking into would hesitate to dismantle him for it.”

Pepper bit her lip. “Are you sure it’s not just…Well, paranoia isn’t uncommon-“

“I’m not paranoid, Pepper,” he interrupted. “I know the symptoms, but it’s not the PTSD talking…The missile that hit me, the one that lodged the shrapnel in my chest, it had my name on it. Literally, I saw the Stark Industries logo on the side before it exploded. No, before you ask, I didn’t imagine it. I saw a lot of Stark Tech in that cave. It was one of _mine_.”

She didn’t insult him by trying to rationalise it. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“I don’t know…but for now at least, I’m playing my cards close to my chest.”

xxx

“3, 2, 1.”

“Lift off achieved, the new flight stabilisers seem to be holding up. The fluctuations have been reduced by another 15%,” Peter listed.

“Glad to hear it, let’s try a slow ascension.”

“Increasing thrust capacity by forty percent.”

“Mind you bring it back down _before_ I hit the ceiling this time. How’s the power to weight ratio?”

“Everything looks good, the modifications you made seem to be working with the new rig quite nicely…I’d recommend redistributing your weight, you’re drifting to the left.”

“Right, I’ll work on that. Bring me back down to the ground and kill power.”

He barely staggered when he hit the ground this time.

“That marks the fourth successful flight check,” Peter said.

“_Congratulations, sir._”

“Right,” Tony said, clapping his hands together as he stepped out of the rig. “I think that entitles me to a drink. Small one, just a nightcap. Don’t wait up for me.”

“Do you want me to return the rig for you?”

Tony only offered a dismissive wave as he left the room, mind already on something else. Peter rolled his eyes; he’d been doing that a lot lately.

“Should I take that as a yes?”

“_It’s probably best not to leave sir’s top secret projects lying around_,” JARVIS agreed with a pang of sympathy. They didn’t really need to speak aloud to communicate with one another, but JARVIS was a firm believer in the importance of practicing tone and intonation.

Peter lifted the rig with the utmost care, disentangling the straps that held it together. Tony was already building a new flight system into the Mark II, with any luck the project would be completed in a matter of weeks.

An alert chimed in Peter’s head, informing him that Pepper’s passcode had been used to unlock the lab door.

“Miss Potts,” he greeted as he replaced the rigging in the storage unit. “Mr Stark just went upstairs for the night. Would you like me to call him back down?”

“That won’t be necessary, Peter. I’m here to talk to you.”

Peter smiled but offered no other indication that he’d heard her. When she didn’t receive any sort of response, she cleared her throat and tried again. “Is that…okay?”

“Of course. How can I help you?”

“Are you…allowed to talk about Tony? Without him knowing?”

“I have a concept of confidentiality, if that’s what you’re asking. I also have protocols in place which prevent me from discussing his private projects.”

“I’m not interested in whatever he’s working on down here,” she clarified. “It’s more…personal than that. I’m worried about him.”

“Very well, what would you like to know?”

It became clear in the way Pepper faltered that she wasn’t entirely sure herself. “You knew him…before.”

“Before?”

“Before Afghanistan.”

“Ah.” Peter nodded but once again failed to respond.

Pepper backtracked, trying to find some semblance of coherency to her thoughts. Already doubts were developing in her mind, but backing out now didn’t seem like much of an option.

“You’ve noticed he’s been acting differently…right? Shutting down weapons development at Stark Industries, holing up in his lab, all these secret projects…”

“Mr Stane requested Mr Stark-“

“I know he told Tony to lie low,” Pepper interrupted. “I also remember the last time he told Tony to stay out of the public eye. Rhodey and Happy had to drag him off the stage at a strip club.”

She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead as if it would help to alleviate the building pressure there. “I just…I _need_ to know if he’s alright.”

Peter observed her as he contemplated his answer. “Since Mr Stark returned from captivity, I have noticed a considerable decline in presentations of self-destructive behaviours. He appears to suffer periods of heightened anxiety, but for the most part has coped with this by focusing his energy on a project he believes will be for the betterment of humanity. Based on my research, this is a…good thing, correct?”

“I hope so. He wasn’t…I knew he had issues before the…I just…You’ll look out for him, won’t you? I’m not really sure what you’re actually programmed to do these days, but sometimes I think he lets his bots get closer to him than people. Even when he’s reaching out, he’s…” Pepper shook her head. “Just look out for him. Promise?”

No one had ever asked him to make a promise before. He tilted his head, mulling over the limited terms she’d outlined.

“Promise,” he agreed.

xxx

“More coffee?”

“In a minute. Here, try this on for me.”

Peter offered his arm without question, allowing Tony to fuss over the straps and make adjustments that would have been a nightmare to perform on himself.

“Are you _sure_ this is safe?”

“What are you, my mother? Let me worry about my own safety for a change.”

“_Sir, may I point out that you have an exceptionally long history of self-destructive behaviour._”

“Thanks. Definitely didn’t ask you.”

“_I am merely stating facts that are a matter of public record._”

“No one likes a smartass, J.”

“_I’ll keep that in mind in future, sir_.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Butterfingers? Mind passing me the plate for the forearm instead of admiring your reflection in it?”

“What are you going to do with it?” Peter asked as he watched Tony work.

“Believe it or not, I’m going to secure it to your forearm.”

“Not the plate, the _suit_. You didn’t save it on the main servers, does that mean you’re not going to sell it?”

“Definitely not. Raise your right arm.”

Peter obeyed. “But if you’re not selling it, what’s the point?”

“I didn’t sell you, did I?”

“That was different. I’m an unfinished prototype,” Peter said with a casualness that didn’t quite fit the subject.

“Not unfinished anymore, reckon I should mail you to an auction house?”

Peter rolled his eyes but otherwise didn’t respond to the joke. Good to see his learning interface was still hard at work.

“I know you’re designing this to _your_ specifications, Mr Stark. Are you really going to pilot it?”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t filled out _any_ of the necessary paperwork. I know you've broken the law before, but nothing JARVIS's files indicate a willingness to build and utilise illegal weaponry."

"Told you, kid. It's not a weapon."

"What is it then?"

"A suit." The pieces of the gauntlet clicked into place, fitting snugly around Peter's forearm.

"How's it feel?"

Peter flexed his fingers, taking a moment to account for the new resistance. "It seems...functional. Mobility is only limited by a margin of about 22%."

"Not bad. Not exactly good either, but it's a start."

"What if you get arrested?"

"Then I guess I'm going to jail."

Peter blinked. "You mean...you'll be gone again? Like before?"

Humour was a fine line to walk with the LMD. On the one hand, he could rival JARVIS in terms of sass and learned the art of sarcasm from interactions with Tony. On the other, he still didn't have a great concept of tone or timing. It still gave Tony whiplash sometimes.

Tony knew him well enough to know they’d crossed that line from joking around to dead serious.

"I don't plan on going anywhere any time soon, kid. They'll have a hard time catching me in this thing."

"What if they decide to shoot you out of the sky?"

Tony winced at his bluntness. "I'll make sure the suit will protect me from whatever they throw at me, alright?"

"But why do you need a suit at all?"

Knowing he wouldn't let the topic go, Tony triggered the release mechanism on the gauntlet. It slipped off Peter’s arm with ease.

"I made a lot of mistakes, Pete. I don't want my legacy to be defined by the weapons I built anymore. I'm done with arming criminals. If I want a shot at fixing some of my mistakes, I'm going to need to do something drastic. If these aren't desperate times…"

He shook his head. "I didn't build you for a battlefield, but if I'd found a solution to your power problem a year ago, that's where you would have wound up. Do you understand? I didn't take responsibility for my inventions then. I’m _trying_ to now. That's why I have to be the one to pilot the suit."

Ethics and morals weren't areas Tony made a point of lecturing Peter on. In hindsight, maybe he should have put more emphasis on them before. The LMD stayed fixed in place, head tilted to the side to indicate he was still processing. After a good thirty seconds passed without any change, Tony sighed.

“When I was in Afghanistan, I made someone a promise.”

Peter blinked, pinched expression smoothing out. “Okay. Would you still like that coffee now that you’ve finished modifying the gauntlet?”

xxx

The suit came together faster than even Peter could have predicted.

Tony dedicated every waking moment to the project, allowing it to consume every aspect of his life. Obadiah didn’t seem to have a problem with his obsessive new work ethic, even if he still refused to design new weapons. Without Obie to chase him out for board meetings and press conferences, nothing prevented Tony from all but living out of the lab.

Peter noticed Pepper’s concern, even if Tony didn’t. He saw the texts from Rhodey that went unread. Even without the exact details of Tony’s trip to the airbase, he knew something had changed.

Despite isolating himself from the outside world, Tony left the news running almost 24/7. Both personal experience and JARVIS’s records indicated he’d never made a habit of doing this before. Even with the music drowning out the noise, he glanced up at regular intervals to check the headlines.

_Waiting for the penny to drop_.

Bit by bit, he allowed Peter to take on bigger projects. Coffee runs became returning tools, then cleaning and maintaining equipment, then using said equipment to handle some of the more mundane tasks around the lab. With every new responsibility, Tony watched from the corner of his eye. Waiting to see if he was ready for the next thing, curious to find out how far he could push the boundaries of his own creation. During Tony’s first ever test flight, Peter watched from the balcony and monitored for aircraft. During Tony’s first ever mission, he monitored Tony’s vitals and analysed the footage for inconsistencies and areas of improvement. Unprompted, he sent Tony a report the next day highlighting every attack that so much as scratched the armour. He wasn’t quite at the point of making his own designs yet. Imagination was a tricky thing to capture, but he was getting there. Who knew where he’d be in a year or two.

Having an assistant in the lab wasn’t all bad either. In the past, Obie had tried to convince him to hire someone to spread the workload. Time is money, and Tony’s time was too valuable to waste doing odd jobs. The last argument they had on the subject ended with Tony building Butterfingers.

The bots were excellent assistants. Okay, oftentimes they made more messes than they cleaned…Sometimes they even seemed like more trouble than they were worth, but Tony wouldn’t trade them in for anything. He’d worked in labs with people before – that’s why he had a custom one built in his basement when he designed the house in Malibu.

The bots got under his feet, and sometimes Dum-E would spend hours picking up nuts and bolts after dropping boxes from new shipments. Sometimes U would miss the cue to start rolling the camera and force Tony to patch together security footage in his reports instead. But people? People watched him while he worked and tried to make conversation when he was engrossed in a new project. The young Stark Industries employees got nervous around him, nervous enough to make mistakes. They had it in their heads that they had something to prove, they’d stumble over their own feet volunteering to bend to his every whim. The senior employees had their own objectives. Promises, promotions, bonuses; they were as predictable as they were transparent. Then there were the _really_ old ones, the people who never wasted an opportunity to tell him how much he reminded them of his father.

He still couldn’t decide which was worse.

The bots didn’t make a fuss when he stayed in the lab until four am, nor were they making a sacrifice to stay and work with him. The bots didn’t operate on a calendar or hold it against him if he didn’t show up on time. They didn’t ask questions when he decided to work on a car instead of a missile, they didn’t discourage him from working on projects that would never make them any money. No fuss, no obligation, no traitorous politics. The perfect assistants.

Peter wasn’t like the other bots.

Aside from JARVIS, most of Tony’s inventions didn’t actually speak. They didn’t really ask before they did things, either. Peter’s behaviour evolved a lot over those three months Tony spent in captivity. Though the exact details were a little ambiguous, he knew the LMD must have spent a fair bit of time in Pepper’s company. It showed, and not just in his interactions with Pepper. It was there in his behaviour around the lab. In the glasses of water that appeared on the counter between cups of coffee, in the way food appeared at Tony’s elbow if he hadn’t eaten anything in a while. He never tried to convince him to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but he frowned if Tony returned to the lab after only a couple hours of sleep.

Tony couldn’t bring himself to mind, not _really_.

The LMD fit into the household with an ease they never could have imagined. With the constraints of a power cord gone, he took advantage of his new freedom and explored the house whenever he wasn’t needed in the lab. Tony saw no reason to switch him off at night, even with Pepper questioning his decision to let the LMD roam unsupervised (_he has strict instructions not to leave the premises, Pep. He’s not going to fall off a cliff if I leave him on while I take a nap_). The AI didn’t have much purpose now, other than to accumulate knowledge and evolve. He would wander the rooms, cataloguing all the odds and ends left behind in the drawers. In the mornings he’d sit in the living room with Pepper. They’d watch the news while she sipped her morning tea and flipped through the company reports.

Their routine couldn’t exactly be described as normal, especially not after Tony entered a no fly zone and took out a terrorist cell…but they made it work. He even started answering Rhodey’s calls again.

From Peter’s perspective, things seemed to be looking up.

Until the day JARVIS shut down.

It happened without warning, without explanation. No error reports, no scheduled reboots in the logs. Only the perimeter alert and a report acknowledging the acceptance of access codes at one of the outside terminals.

Not once in Peter’s short life had the AI gone offline. The sudden absence of input from the network made him pause before he did the only logical thing an AI programmed to learn could do.

He went to investigate.

“You must be Peter,” Obadiah said with a shark-like smile when Peter found him the side door where the disturbance originated. “I heard he’d hired a new lab assistant.”

Peter tilted his head. Tony never gave him specific instructions regarding Obadiah. Never mentioned if he’d decided to keep him informed with the LMD project.

He couldn’t access JARVIS’s logs with the network offline, but Peter still had his own memories to fall back on. Obadiah watching Tony work on him in the lab back when his AI was in its infancy, Obadiah losing interest in the project long before Peter even had a face to call his own.

“That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “Is there anything I can help you with, Mr Stane?”

“Oh I very much doubt that,” Obadiah chuckled. “Just here to collect something…Have you spoken to Tony at all today?”

“Not since this morning, I’m afraid. Mister Stark has been out most of the day.”

Something in Obadiah’s expression shifted, but even Peter wasn’t advanced enough to read the minute shift.

“I didn’t beat him here by much,” he commented. “Tony should be back any minute now. Say, it’s getting late. He doesn’t normally make you work nights, does he?”

Peter blinked. “I work whatever hours Mister Stark requires.”

Obadiah’s smile grew strained. “Tell you what, Tony and I were talking about having a drink. Why don’t you take the night off? In fact, I’m sure Tony said he was going to call ahead and have you leave early tonight. You know how he is, brilliant mind but memory of a sieve.”

Someone else may have noticed the signs. The thinly veiled excuses and the strange tension in his words combined with JARVIS mysteriously going offline…But Peter wasn’t programmed for threat assessment. Though familiar with the concept, betrayal wasn’t something he’d yet been taught to detect, let alone to deal with. As far as he was concerned, a regular guest with security clearance second to only Tony himself had just presented him with clear instructions.

It wasn’t in the LMD’s nature to question it.

xxx

The stairs to the lab were in the same general direction as the front door. Obie had no reason to pursue or even doubt Peter as he slipped out of the room.

It seemed…quiet without JARVIS around to interface with. Even the bots seemed to feel his absence.

With no other tasks to carry out, Peter returned to his charging dock in the corner of the lab. He didn’t _need_ it anymore, not with the brand new arc reactor sitting in his chest, but the designated workspace continued to act as the closest thing he had to a room.

Despite being accustomed to near constant stimuli, the LMD wasn’t physically capable of growing bored. He took advantage of the down time to run his daily diagnostics check, but otherwise contented himself in sending continuous prompts to the still inactive JARVIS.

Without the AI’s security logs, he didn’t even know if Tony was home yet. No doubt the inventor would fix whatever issue caused the AI to shut down. In the meantime, the LMD began shutting down non-essential systems to conserve resources.

He’d spent rather a lot of time on stand-by during Tony’s absence, even with Pepper making daily visits down to the lab. The procedure was hardly unfamiliar to him.

When it became clear Peter wouldn’t be entertaining them, Butterfingers returned to sorting through the clutter on one of the workbenches. Dum-E moved over to help but only succeeded in knocking a half-empty mug to the floor. The let out a sound like a squawk at the sight of the broken ceramic.

Another request to establish a remote connection with JARVIS’s server. Another unreceived response.

Under normal circumstances, JARVIS would have alerted him if someone in the building appeared distressed. The security footage would have shown him someone attempting to approach the lab.

As it was, he didn’t realise Tony needed help until he tumbled down the stairs and landed in a crumpled heap outside the lab door.

Peter blinked. “Mr Stark? Do you require medical attention?”

The billionaire didn’t respond, every ounce of his focus and energy invested in forcing his shaking limbs to co-operate. He forced himself off the ground, grasping for traction against the sheer glass doors. Even with JARVIS offline, the backup system still maintained their most fundamental security protocols. He managed to punch in the code for the door and it swung open, sending him sprawling across the floor once again.

Peter rushed forward, noting symptoms and researching causes as he approached.

_Pallor skin, excessive sweating, laboured breathing, reduced co-ordination and balance, muscle tremors in the extremities, right hand clutching his chest (source of pain?)_

The LMD’s brow furrowed as he researched appropriate courses of action. He wasn’t programmed to handle medical emergencies, not yet anyway. JARVIS should be the emergency responder in this kind of situation, but JARVIS remained silent. “Mr Stark, would you like me to phone an ambulance?”

This time, he received a response. Blood shot eyes focused in on him, pleading and hoping he would understand. Tony didn’t so much pull his hand away from his chest as let it drop uselessly to the floor. With the gaping hole in his chest where the arc reactor used to be – where it _should_ be – on display, a more complete picture formed in Peter’s head.

Tony’s gaze flicked back and forth between the LMD and something on the desk behind him, pleading with him to understand when his lips refused to form words.

A sentence is all it would take, a single line of instruction and the LMD would leap into action and retrieve the Mark I arc reactor for him.

Peter didn’t need to turn to follow to his gaze, he knew every item on the lab bench behind him. Knew that on it sat an antiquated power source that would buy Tony enough time to build a new reactor.

It wasn’t in Peter’s programming to question Obadiah’s motives in entering the house. He’d been built to learn, adapted to act as an assistant, but security wasn’t an issue Tony designed him to concern himself with.

Security wasn’t a priority…but anticipating Tony’s needs? That was a different matter entirely.

Peter could perform billions of calculations in the time it took him to lift his hand to the apparatus in his chest. The likelihood that Tony’s reactor would have malfunctioned, the odds that a malfunction would have coincided with JARVIS shutting down by chance, the factors that would require JARVIS to shut down at the command of someone other than Tony himself, the chances that Tony’s current state was the result of anything other than malicious intent.

Peter didn’t know Obadiah, didn’t _need_ to know Obadiah. He knew _Tony_.

Mr Stark wouldn’t let his creation out of his hands without a fight, and an outdated power source wouldn’t stop him from pursuing it.

The inventor’s eyes widened in surprise as he watched the LMD reach under his shirt and remove the still glowing arc reactor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to start off by saying congratulations to aymiwalker for literally predicting that ending after reading chapter 1. *Cough* You may or may not have written it better than I did.
> 
> I have…mixed feelings about this chapter, really wasn’t all that happy with it but at least some stuff actually happened in this one! Once again, let me know what you liked, if there’s anything you think I could/should change or improve. I’d appreciate your thoughts on this weird AU so far if you’ve got a second to spare.


	4. Irish Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The house in Malibu is full of ghosts, not all of them deceased.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure this chapter took me longer to write than all three of the previous ones combined (thank god I had a buffer). I had to start over…I think three times? Out of curiosity, I checked my discarded attempts and I have 4000 words worth of scrapped content. All things considered, I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out.
> 
> Go read Footloose_Poet's series if you haven't already! You can find it riiiiiight [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/993537)

Tony never expected to dread coming home that night.

After everything he’d been through, surely that should have been something to look forward to? The comfort of his own home, sleeping off his injuries. After surviving a half dozen accounts of attempted murder, all orchestrated by someone he’d looked up to as a father figure ever since his own father’s passing…Surely he’d earned that luxury?

Then there was the added stress of dodging both Pepper and SHIELD’s attempts to coerce him into receiving medical treatment.

During those long months he spent slaving away in a sweltering cave, he would _dream_ about his bed in the Malibu house. Sometimes Yinsen would convince him to lie down for a while, when the heat of the desert combined with the ever-burning furnace made it impossible to see through the sweat. Sometimes, when his brain all but cooked inside his skull, he would swear he could feel the silk sheets in place of scratchy cloth. He longed for his mattress and the foam that always stayed blissfully cool in the summer months. He could forget, if he allowed himself to slip far enough into delirium, that he was lying on a hard cot instead of soft foam, moulded over the course of years to fit his body shape.

There was another human-shaped indent in the bed; one moulded by dozens of bodies that now fit none of them. Tonight, more than ever, he longed to bring someone back with him. It wouldn’t be difficult to convince someone. If not a date to fill an empty bed, then perhaps a friend to quiet the echo in the empty house. He thought, just for a moment, about asking Pepper to join him.

Then he remembered she’d suffered almost as much as he had that night and deserved a good night’s sleep more than anyone. Bringing a stranger into the house was out of the question right now, so Tony forced himself to smile. He charmed the emergency responders under SHIELD’s thumb into letting him go after only a basic physical, answered the questions of any agent who pestered him enough.

He dreaded returning to the empty house, but he knew what he had to do.

For once, the driveway didn’t light up upon his arrival. The sun would be rising before long, but for the moment he’d have to handle a rare downside to living in such an isolated area: minimal light pollution.

Happy offered him a torch from the emergency kit in the back of the car which Tony accepted. He also offered his own assistance which Tony chose to decline. He did ask him to move the bag containing a good portion of his disassembled suit inside. With the help of SHIELD, he’d been able to scavenge some equipment from the wreckage of Obadiah’s workshop. Disassembly was a pain from the comfort of his state of the art lab, removing the armour by _hand_ was a nightmare. A large portion of the torso still refused to budge without the proper tools. He’d _designed_ it that way, in the hopes that it might offer him some protection should someone try to forcibly remove the armour.

He made a mental note to perfect the process with the Mark IV.

“You can just leave it in the entry way, Hap,” he said, waving off the bodyguard. The man let out a grunt which Tony chose to interpret as acknowledgement rather than exertion. He was sure the man would be fine.

Tony made a beeline for the nearest security panel and got to work undoing Obie’s attempts at sabotage. The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, probably because he thought he could make a quick buck out of the system down the line. Tony spent a good deal of the time cursing himself for ever giving the man JARVIS’s access codes.

At least he could probably still recover the suit’s backup, even with all the damage it had sustained. A small reassurance that they’d be able to rebuild regardless of the damage.

He barely noticed when Happy approached him, waving off the bodyguard without really registering what he was saying. At some point he got back in the car, though Tony neither noticed his departure nor remembered where he said he was going. During his fourth attempt at rebooting the system, Tony noticed with some surprise that his hands were shaking.

After what felt like an eternity, the house came back to life. He switched off the torch as the sensors adjusted to the sudden time jump and illuminated the path in front of him.

“You with us, J?” he asked. A terrifying beat of silence followed, and Tony held his breath. If this didn’t work, if he’d miscalculated, if the diagnostic reading was wrong and Obadiah-

“_Of course, sir. I do apologise for my unexpected absence._”

Tony couldn’t help it, he laughed.

“Don’t worry about it, Jar.”

The AI paused again. “_Sir, need I remind you that you could have initiated a system reboot from inside?_”

Tony’s smile dimmed. “Suppose I’ve put it off long enough.”

“_Sir?_”

Too exhausted to even make an attempt at an explanation, Tony dusted off his jeans and headed inside.

The low lighting normally looked so inviting, but tonight he would have preferred something harsher.

“Hey, JARVIS?” he asked, lowering his voice. “How long was the security system offline?”

“_Approximately six hours, sir._”

Six hours with the doors unlocked, no way of knowing if anyone made their way in or out during that time.

Tony shook his head and pushed aside his paranoia. “Good to be home, J.”

“_Good to have you home, sir._”

Instead of making a beeline for the lab, he took a detour through the kitchen to stop off at what Pepper called the “pantry”. Tony preferred to think of it as a liquor closet.

At parties, people tended to bring wine. Something about it being classy and expensive appealed to a great many of his business associates. The ones who preferred a bit of flare brought flashy champagne bottles, but the ones who knew him best bought the harder stuff.

Tony’s insides twisted as his gaze landed on the case of whiskey he received for his last birthday. The seal was still intact when he removed it, the last bottle in the set untouched since Obadiah gifted it to him. He turned it over in his hands, getting a feel for the weight of it. God knew how much it cost. Knowing Obie, no doubt a small fortune.

_I’ve known Tony longer than he’s known himself. Though I've never admitted it to Tony sober, I’ve always thought of the Starks as family. As much as if they’d been my own blood._

The sound of it shattering didn’t drown out the memory of the speech Obadiah made that night, but it sure as hell didn’t hurt.

_And after Howard died and Tony was left with the unimaginable burden of living up to his legacy, of inheriting his father’s company and all those expectations…I began to think of him as more of a son._

How had he been so blind? He knew he didn’t make Obie’s job easy, but how did he miss the hatred he’d seen in his eyes up on the roof? More than anything, he wished he could ask where the truth ended and the lies began. Did he _ever_ care? If not for Tony, then for Howard? All those family dinners…

Did he dream of killing his parents the same way he so clearly dreamed of killing Tony?

He shook his head. These weren’t thoughts he wanted to ponder right now, but he couldn’t quite banish them from his mind. Every second spent in Obadiah’s company seemed to play on repeat in his head, as if he could glean some small insight into the motivations of the man he once thought knew him best. If he combed through every interaction, over-analysed every detail, would it seem obvious in hindsight? Could he pinpoint the moment everything changed? Could he trace it all back to one wrong decision? Could he have _prevented_ this mess?

In truth, Tony wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Fragments of glass crunched beneath his feet, though he couldn't remember making the decision to start walking. Pepper would give him shit for not cleaning up the mess, already the kitchen reeked of whiskey, but that was a problem for another time.

He had more important things to worry about now.

The living room looked more or less the same as he'd left it. He tried to ignore the shattered remains of the lamp and the overturned side table he'd knocked over trying to reach the lab.

_Uncoordinated movements, limbs refusing follow the most basic instructions. Balance thrown to shit, reaching for _anything_ to help him stay on his feet. Anything to keep him _moving_ while over and over again he did the math. How long will it take for the paralysis to subside, how long will it take for the shrapnel to kill him, what’s the likelihood anyone will notice his absence before then, what are the odds that he’ll be able to make it to Pepper before Obadiah-_

Tony descended the stairs to the lab at a relaxed pace. JARVIS switched on the lights when he reached the bottom, but otherwise remained silent. The bots didn’t respond to the change in lighting, didn’t budge an inch when he unlocked the lab door. They stooped at an odd angle, huddled close together as if in mourning.

“Hey there,” he called out softly. They stirred but offered little more than twitches in response.

Tony knew what to expect when he approached them, but the sight of the lifeless android still made him shudder.

When active, Peter managed convey a somewhat convincing imitation of life. His responses were still a little awkward at times, he had a tendency to stare off into space when he wasn't actively involved in a conversation. Sometimes he made choices that, while perfectly logical when he explained his thinking, seemed erratic by a human's standards. But, without any basis for an alternative, he could pass for human in the company of strangers.

Inactive, his imitation of death was flawless.

Glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling in an unseeing stare, legs bent under him from where he fell to his knees before collapsing backwards (and oh how desperately Tony wanted to catch him before he could fall). Dum-E nudged his open palm but didn't receive so much as a twitch in response.

Without thinking, Tony knelt beside the bots and brushed the hair out of Peter’s vacant eyes. Normally the motion would earn him a look of surprise or, more recently, a smile. Instead, the LMD's face remained fixed in a neutral expression that looked somehow out of place.

“I’ll fix him,” he vowed.

He received only silence in return.

xxx

“How’s it looking, JARVIS?”

“_Very promising, sir. The new power source appears stable_.”

“Alright, Peter. Let’s try the usual checks”

Peter opened his eyes, artificial pupils expanding and contracting. Thin fingers flexed, a beat passing before his artificial chest rose in imitation of breath. He blinked at the ceiling, then blinked again.

“You’ve made some modifications since I was last online.”

“Sure did. Everything look normal?”

“Internal sensors indicate that everything is working within normal parameters.”

“No corruption or lost data?”

Peter tilted his head, though the movement looked a little strange when he was lying down.

“My last records are from…approximately thirty-six hours ago.”

“So you remember what happened?”

"You entered the lab in a state of distress, the Mark II reactor missing from your chest apparatus. I removed my own power source as it should have, in theory, acted as a reasonable substitute for the Mark II.”

“Without running _any_ of your standard shut-down procedures,” Tony huffed. “You do know you’re a prototype, right? Redundant power supplies weren’t exactly a priority when I built you. Hell, I couldn’t find a suitable _primary_ power source when I built you.”

Peter tilted his head again.

“The updated logs indicate you have since installed a backup."

Tony shrugged. “I already had to rebuild the Mark II reactor and replace the one I borrowed from you after it got a little banged up in the fight with Obie. Didn’t take much to build one more.”

Peter hesitated. “You were unable to retrieve the Mark II, then?”

The LMD raised his head to meet Tony’s eyes, facial expression relaxing for a split second before he attempted a look of concern. Tony considered re-establishing the LMD’s connection with JARVIS. With any luck, he’d avoid having this conversation all together. The surveillance and debriefings would be more detailed than his summary of events ever could be…but Tony found himself dragging his desk chair over to the workbench.

“Obadiah stole my reactor to power a suit,” he admitted. “I had to destroy it…All of it. The suit, the reactor. I talked Pepper through detonating the prototype reactor in the factory and…”

When the words trailed off, he mimed an explosion with his hands.

“A suit? Like yours?” Peter asked.

“Yup, I guess they managed to dig up enough of the Mark I from the crash site in Afghanistan. Only thing missing was this,” he tapped the arc reactor in his chest for emphasis.

“He tried to kill you for it.”

Tony tried not to wince at his bluntness. The betrayal stung; he didn’t know if it would ever _stop_ stinging. “It’s a good thing you were there to help, then.”

Peter frowned. Not out of concentration or confusion, but genuine discontent. Despite the circumstances, Tony felt a pang of pride at the advancement.

“I didn’t stop him,” the LMD refuted. “I could have, I spoke with him before it happened…but I didn’t.”

“That’s not on you, kid.”

“You could have died,” Peter said stubbornly.

“But I didn’t, you saved my life. Pretty sure that more than makes up for a tiny mistake, wouldn’t you say?”

The LMD spent far too long calculating for Tony’s taste.

“Look, kid, I trusted him too. For decades, in fact. If I didn’t see this coming, I’m sure as hell not holding it against you. I didn’t program you with paranoia, you had no reason to distrust him.”

The LMD still didn’t reply.

Tony sighed. “C’mon, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

xxx

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

Pepper fixed him with an unimpressed stare. “You just outed your secret identity to the world’s press, the news outlets are playing your speech on repeat, it’s only a matter of time before the military demand you turn over your suit and, oh yeah, SHIELD are demanding we each fill out a mountain of paperwork.”

Tony waved her off. “We can worry about later. Right now, we’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“Not dying isn’t a good enough reason to celebrate? Happy, pull in here.”

Pepper frowned when she caught sight of the sign. “A diner? Really?”

“You did tell me to lay low,” he reminded her. “A diner is about as inconspicuous as we’re going to get.”

“…I’m never going to talk you out of this, am I?”

“Not a chance.”

She sighed. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

Tony beamed. “Get the door for the kid, would you Happy?”

“Why can’t the kid get his own door?”

“Because I asked you nicely?”

Grumbling under his breath, Happy walked around the car to open the rear door.

“Thank you!” Peter said, all but bouncing out of the car, undettered when he stumbled a little on the way down. He'd never been in a car before, Tony was confident he'd get used to it.

“Easy, kid,” Tony warned him. “Just take it slow, you’re still adjusting.”

Happy gave the pair a strange look before shaking his head, evidently deciding it would be too much trouble to ask. “Give me a call when you want picked up.”

“We won’t be long,” Pepper interjected before Tony could respond. “Thank you, Happy.”

“There are _birds_ here,” Peter said before the billionaire could protest. He turned around to find the LMD watching a pigeon with an expression of sheer delight.

“Sure are,” he replied, ignoring Happy’s blatant stares. “C’mon, kid. We’re going inside now. Don’t give me that look, I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to admire the pigeons later.”

“Are you _sure_ this is a good idea?” Pepper asked when they moved out of earshot. “Has he even been outside before?”

"I programmed the LMD to learn from experience. He won’t adapt until we throw him in the deep end. Relax, Pep, it’ll be fine.”

Pepper didn't bother replying, knowing nothing she said would make him budge. She shivered as they stepped inside the diner. The air conditioning was turned up a little high for her personal taste, but at least it was quiet.

“Black coffee,” Tony said without prompting. Either the man behind the till didn’t recognise him or didn't really care.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“I’ll take a tea.”

The man waited to see if Peter would speak up, but the LMD hardly seemed to notice he was there. After a moment, he shrugged, calling out for them to take a seat anywhere before he wandered off through the kitchen door.

“Peter?” Pepper asked with a frown. It wasn’t like the android to be so inattentive.

“It’s you, Mr Stark.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow before she took a step back and followed his gaze. She’d missed the clunky television set in her cursory glance of the room, but the story seemed to have captured Peter’s interest. He watched with rapt attention as yet another rerun of Tony’s now infamous “I am Ironman” speech played on mute.

“Trying to keep a low profile, kid,” Tony reminded him.

“Sorry.”

They took a seat at a booth rather than a table and fell into a comfortable if awkward silence. For lack of anything better to do, Pepper browsed the selection of milkshakes on their drinks menu.

“A black coffee and a tea. You want milk with that?”

“I think we’re fine,” Pepper said politely when Tony failed to acknowledge the question.

“Well, we’ve got sugar packets up by the till…Sure I can’t get anything for the kid?”

“No, I’m fine. Thank you for asking, though,” Peter replied, taking Pepper by surprise. The man shrugged.

“Shout if that changes.”

Tony squinted at Peter as their waiter retreated. “When did you get so polite?”

“He didn’t get it from you, that’s for sure.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know that’s...probably accurate,” he conceded with a shrug.

“Seriously, Tony. What are we doing here?”

“Call it a test run.”

“A test run for _what_?”

“Him,” he nodded to Peter. The LMD didn’t seem to notice, his attention captured by a jogger with a Jack Russell terrier across the street. “This seemed like a good place to start. Quiet environment, familiar people. We can limit his interactions with strangers while allowing plenty of opportunities to observe human behaviour. It’s perfect.”

Peter’s head whipped round when the bell above the door chimed to indicate the arrival of a new customer. They seemed to be a regular based on the way they greeted their waiter. He watched their interaction with interest, noting the relaxed body language and occasional hand gestures to aid in conveying their point. Pepper’s brow furrowed.

“A test run implies you’re planning something bigger. What happened to seeing how he evolves naturally?”

“He’s still going to learn at his own pace,” Tony assured her. “I just…thought I might start letting him out of the lab more. He can’t learn everything from television.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re up to something.”

“Hey, no master plan here!”

“Tony…” she warned.

“Alright, fine. I’ve been thinking about giving him a…promotion, if you will. He’s been doing great in the lab, but he’s a hell of a lot more advanced than U and Dum-E, Pep. I built him to serve in a _military_ capacity, it's be a waste of his potential to keep him in the basement making coffee."

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, Happy already thinks he’s an intern…”

Pepper pinched the bridge of her nose. Just _thinking_ about the amount of paperwork involved in what he was suggesting-

“Now, hold on. Before you go dismissing th-“

“He doesn’t even have an _identity_, Tony,” she hissed, trying to keep her voice down. “How the hell are we supposed to go about hiring him?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Think about it, Pep. It’s perfect! You’re always saying how much work I generate; he’s been handling half my paperwork since I taught him to forge my signature anywa-“

“You _what?!_”

“Relax, he’s not going to commit identity theft anytime soon. Right, Pete?”

Pepper suddenly became aware that the LMD had been watching their unfolding argument with interest. He paused, tilting his head.

“I think I would enjoy assisting Miss Potts outside of the lab,” he decided. The pair stared.

“See? He agrees with me.”

Pepper sighed, resisting the urge to rub her temples. At least she wouldn’t be alone in trying to figure out this mess.

xxx

"_Sir, that package isn't addressed to you."_

Tony paused, his hands still outstretched towards the neat knot of twine holding the brown paper parcel together.

"It's on my desk," he countered with a frown.

"Might I suggest reading the note?"

"There's a note?"

Upon closer examination, he found the slip of paper in question folded under the strands of string. He reread the name twice more just to be sure his tired eyes weren't playing tricks on him.

"Hey, kid? Did you order something?"

"I'm not allowed to order things."

"Wait, what? Why?"

"Pepper told me I couldn't buy anything without her permission anymore because I kept ordering take out," he shrugged without looking up from his calculations. He was still reluctant to write anything by hand when he could interface with the system wirelessly, but Tony had convinced him to try.

He thought about asking a follow-up question but thought better of it. Easier to just ask Pepper the next time he saw her.

"Well, wherever it came from, this package has your name on it."

Peter closed his project to join Tony in investigating the mysterious box.

"Handwriting analysis indicates that Pepper wrote this note," he commented. Tony bit his tongue to keep from asking how _else_ the package could have found its way to his desk if not through Pepper. Then again, with that Fury guy breaking through his security last week…

"JARVIS?"

"_I can confirm that Pepper delivered the parcel personally,_" he said with a note of amusement. "_I assure you, it's quite safe._"

"Good enough for me, care to do the honours?"

Peter hesitated, hands hovering uncertainly. Only then did it occur to Tony that the LMD had never needed to untie a knot before.

After a few seconds of frantic internet searches, he tugged experimentally on the trail of twine and watched it unravel. Tony tried not to get impatient with him as he removed the brown paper, taking the utmost care not to tear it.

“Any day now, kid.”

The LMD frowned. “If I’m careful, the materials could be reused.”

“I’m a billionaire, we don’t have to reuse brown paper. Recycling bins exist for a reason.”

All the same, Peter managed to pull it off in a perfect sheet.

“It’s a box,” he commented.

“No shit, Sherlock. Open it.”

Peter took the lid off the shallow cardboard box and carefully folded back the tissue paper as if the contents were something precious. Tony would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little underwhelmed.

“Huh, I guess Pepper thought you needed something new to wear.”

Peter looked sceptical as he examined the folded up T-Shirt. “Should I try it on?”

“Why not?” Tony said, already losing interest. Mysterious package on his desk? Interesting. Clothes shopping for the android? Less so. He supposed they _would_ have to expand Peter’s wardrobe if he would be spending more time outside. People were bound to notice him wearing the same shirt all the time after a while.

“Hey, JAR? Bring up the updated suit designs for me to play around with, would you? I've got some ideas for making it more…portable.”

“_It’s a bit late to be making those kinds of adjustments to the Mark IV, wouldn’t you say, sir?_”

“Let’s leave the Mark IV as it is. Open a new project folder entitled Mark V.”

“Is it a joke?” Peter interrupted.

“Hmm?”

Tony glanced back at the LMD and froze.

There was nothing immediately alarming about the shirt. It fit him rather well, actually, aside from being a little baggy around the shoulders. The thin fabric did nothing to disguise the blue light emanating from his chest.

As strange as it was to see the reactor on display, it was the words that captured Tony’s attention. Silver lettering arched around the reactor, acting as a border for that perfect circle of light.

_Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart_

“I don’t get it,” Peter said, brow creasing as he stared at the words splashed across his chest. “I can’t find any reference to the phrase online. Does it have a personal meaning?”

Tony couldn’t help but laugh, the sound catching on the lump forming in his throat.

“Yeah, kid. Call it an inside joke.”

“Oh…” Peter looked down at the shirt again. “It must be a good joke if it made you laugh.”

“It’s a great joke,” he agreed. “You should go tell Pepper how much you like your gift.”

The frown vanished, replaced by a grin. “That’s a great idea!”

Tony shook his head as he watched him race up the stairs. And to think, a few months ago he couldn’t even leave the lab.”

“_Sir_,” JARVIS cut in, his hesitance audible even through that singular word. Tony sighed.

“Might as well spit it out, J.”

“_I have received a response from the lab. Would you like to review the results of your blood test now or later?_”

The smile faltered. “Might as well get it over with. Give it to me straight, JAR.”

“_It is…more or less in keeping with what you expected, sir._”

The air left Tony’s lungs, but he forced himself to remain composed. “That’s…unfortunate.”

“_The new design has definitely slowed the progression, but the Mark I released a significant amount of palladium into your bloodstream over the course of the three months you spent in captivity_.”

"Slowed,” Tony repeated. “But not stopped.”

“_That is correct, sir_.”

“Do I have…options?”

JARVIS hesitated. “_I would recommend running additional tests before jumping to any conclusions, sir_.”

Tony nodded. He couldn’t remember reaching for it, but he found himself gripping the edge of the workbench. It kept him steady, grounded. He inhaled deeply, hating the feeling of his chest expanding around the apparatus.

“I’m dying.” It felt strange to say it aloud after months of trying not to think about it. The words felt heavy on his tongue, but somehow made him want to laugh. He could appreciate the poetry in it. Three months slaving away in a cave in Afghanistan just to die from heavy metal poisoning. All caused by the thing he built to keep him alive; and people said the universe didn't have a sense of humour

“Looks like Obie got what he paid for after all.”

After a painful silence, JARVIS spoke up. “_Would you like me to call on Miss Potts?_”

“No.”

“_Not even-_“

“I said no, J…Just give me some time to process this.”

“_Will you tell Peter at least? I don’t think it’s wise for you to spend too much time alone right now, sir_.”

Tony watched Dum-E chase the sheet of brown paper around the lab, oblivious to the unfolding crisis.

“I’ll tell him,” he decided. “When he comes back from talking to Pepper.”

JARVIS paused.

“_Would you like me to bring up the Mark V renderings for you to adjust while you wait, sir?_”

Tony cracked a smile.

“Show me what you’ve got.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is a little shorter than the last one, I didn’t want to unnecessarily pad the word count I say <del>as if most of what I write isn’t filler.</del> On the upside, I gave it to you early! I wasn't planning to release it till Sunday. I'm trying to stick to every 2 weeks or so for uploads. I know it probably feels like ages but it's the best I can manage with my schedule right now, and I'm doing my best to stick to it.
> 
> Let's all give it up for Aymiwalker who put forth the amazing suggestion that Pepper give Peter the "proof that Tony Stark has a heart shirt"! Also thanks to LordLuminous for asking that I follow through with the request on the last chapter.  
This fic would be nothing without all you guys. I can't always guarantee I'll be able to follow every suggestion but I always love hearing them!
> 
> On a side note, do you guys think I should make a tumblr that’s actually linked to my ao3 account? No idea what I’d post on it, probably the same trash Marvel posts I reblog on my main account. Would anyone even be interested in that? Let me know what you guys think.


	5. Vodka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony struggles with his own mortality. Meanwhile, Peter is more interested in the mysterious red haired notary who bested Tony's security guard without breaking a sweat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Throws out chapter 2 weeks after it was promised even though it's been basically finished for over a week and my nit-picky brain kept insisting it wasn't quite right*  
Merry Christmas y'all

Peter took the news about as well as Tony could have hoped. It took him an entire half-minute to process the information – an eternity by the android’s standards. He hesitated over his follow-up questions as if afraid to overstep his bounds, no doubt frantically extracting information from every related source he could access online.

_He’s a robot_, Tony reminded himself. No matter how advanced, he still had certain…limitations in the emotions department. He couldn’t stress or fret or cry…He’d never let it _change_ anything. Even if he altered his behaviours in response to the news, his perception of Tony would remain unchanged. The LMD also didn’t insult his intelligence by trying to convince him that there was still a chance he could be wrong. They may not have exhausted every possibility just yet, but Tony’s hopes weren’t high.

Peter neatly sidestepped every response he feared from Pepper. He supposed the LMD must have considered the possibility of his death during those months in Afghanistan and come to terms with what that would mean for him. Same outcome, different time frame.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell Miss Potts?”

Tony resisted the urge to slam his head against the desk. Between the LMD and JARVIS, he’d lost count of the number of times he’d been asked that.

“Positive.”

Maybe the news should have come as more of a shock, but right now he just felt tired. Tomorrow he’d start running simulations, exhaust every possible alternative, but he already knew what the outcome would be. Palladium was his only viable option and palladium was killing him.

Peter let the topic drop that day, but he should have known it wouldn’t last long.

“Do you think you’ll _ever_ tell anyone?” he asked as he retrieved a replacement core for the reactor only a few days after the news dropped.

“I don’t know, kid,” Tony replied, surprising himself with his own honesty.

“Won’t it be harder if they don’t know?”

“As opposed to watching me die slowly, wondering every time they leave the room if it’ll be the last time they ever see me?”

“It would give them time to prepare,” he insisted stubbornly. “People will find out eventually, won’t they? Wouldn’t it be better to announce it on your own terms?”

Tony sighed, focusing his attention on disengaging the reactor instead of answering the question. The acrid smell of burning metal was growing more familiar by the day.

“I can do that.”

The billionaire paused before shrugging. “Knock yourself out.”

Peter held the reactor like it was something precious, removing the still smoking core without considering the heat. A look of approval crossed Tony’s face as he supervised the unfaltering exchange.

“Here, good as new,” the LMD said as he offered up the reactor. “Would you like me to look into obtaining the necessary components to synthesise more cores? You seem to be running a little low.”

He’d already discussed the matter with JARVIS, of course. The reorder line for the materials he needed to create his reactor’s core had been carefully calculated to maintain a constant buffer, just in case they ran into any difficulties with the deliveries…but he’d run the numbers. Even if they assumed the best case scenario, he had enough cores to keep the reactor running until-

Well.

“That’s alright, JARVIS is on it,” he lied, hitting the reactor a little harder than necessary. Peter didn’t question the statement; not once did it seem to occur to him that Tony might be lying.

Then again, the kid had an active connection to JARVIS. Maybe the AI ratted him out and the LMD simply chose not to comment on it. That _would_ be pretty typical, his AIs conspiring against him just as he was about to kick the bucket. Wouldn’t it be ironic if his work to establish Iron Man as a nuclear deterrent turned out to be for nought because his own creations decided to start a robot uprising?

God, he _really_ needed to start sleeping more.

“How’s the Expo coming along?” he asked, in part to change the subject but also because he _needed_ that distraction right now.

“Everything’s going according to schedule. Pepper’s still not happy about the whole thing.”

Tony laughed. “Yeah, she’s been making her opinions on this little side project pretty clear.”

Peter quietened, observing his reactions closely. “She asked me to handle some of the preparations for your grand entrance.”

“Oh yeah?”

“She said she didn’t trust you to oversee the construction of the stage. Something about you having a history of displaying poor time management skills.”

He snorted. “Probably for the best. Hell, you could probably build it by hand at this point.”

Peter lit up at the compliment. “Pepper is helping me vet construction teams to handle the disassembly line. It’s going to be tricky, but so long as you stick the landing just right-“

“Hey!” Tony protested. “I’ll have you know I have _fantastic_ aim.”

“So long as you have JARVIS manning your targeting system,” he quipped.

“When the hell did you get so snarky?”

“Must be Pepper’s influence wearing off on me.”

xxx

The expo opening was a resounding success, but somehow Tony didn’t feel much like celebrating.

His death sentence had been delivered; every conceivable option exhausted. He might just live to see the new year if he took care of himself…if he stopped using the suit…

Yeah, like that was ever gonna happen.

“Would you like me to handle the arrangements?” Peter asked in a small voice, as if unsure if it was his place to ask.

“Arrangements?”

“It’s just…normally Pepper handles any legal issues, but if you don’t intend to tell her…”

The words snapped Tony out of his daze. Yes, practicality would be essential from here on out. He still had time. Maybe not enough to change the outcome, but enough to tie up loose ends. Maybe if he played his cards right…

“Arrangements,” he repeated. “Alright, JARVIS? Start a file and store it on the private server. Hide it in with my current projects. For now we’ll call it…”

He wracked his brains for an idea, but for once came up blank. He needed something…plain. Nondescript. Something that wouldn’t stand out if someone happened to stumble upon it. Names normally came easily to him, but somehow nothing seemed to fit this one quite right. “Let’s just stick with Plan B for now. I need you to start making a list of preparations that need to be made, I want the transition after I…I want things to be as straight forward as possible, understood?”

“_I’m not sure things are ever going to be straight forward, sir_,” JARVIS said gently.

“Anything to make it easier. No doubt everybody will be scrambling over ownership of the suits…At least if I make my wishes clear, it’ll look cleaner in court.”

“You should arrange a meeting with a lawyer,” Peter said.

“Agreed, someone discreet. See if Jennifer has anything on the books. At least appointing Pepper CEO should be straight forward enough…maybe I better take care of that one while I’m still kicking. It’ll make it harder for people to argue with my decision-making.”

“Do you think you’ll leave the suits to her as well?”

He hesitated, eyes flickering over to the display cases lining the walls. “Leave her the patents. I trust her with the decision making, the intellectual property side of it. She’ll be better with it than I ever was…The suits themselves go to Rhodey.”

“_Sir, are you quite sure? Given his military ties-_“

“I know the risks, JAR, but Pepper’s not a pilot. I’ll leave stipulations that Rhodey should be the sole pilot, throw in a few security protocols while I’m at it to hopefully foil any attempts to give someone else the controls…I guess, at the end of the day, if he wants to hand them over to the military after I’m dead, it’s his choice.”

_After I’m dead_.

The words slipped out without hesitation, but they were strange to hear aloud. He supposed he’d have to get used to it.

“What about hospitals?”

Tony wrinkled his nose. “I’ll avoid them for as long as I can, I guess.”

“If you’re meeting with a lawyer, you should probably start thinking about assigning someone power of attorney.”

He didn’t need to think about the answer for that one. “Pepper. Leave everything to Pepper.”

“Does that include funeral arrangements?”

For a moment he contemplated telling him to keep it simple. _Rhodey, Pepper, Happy. Who else could I possibly need there?_

“She’ll do a better job of it than I ever could,” he conceded. No doubt she’d make it something befitting of the life he’d lived. Tasteful, flashy, something suitably atheistic for the service…

“Just…tell her I asked to be buried in the same graveyard as my parents and…” _and Jarvis_. “It’s what’s expected. Keep it straight forward.”

“Understood.”

Planning eased the tightness in his chest a fraction. It gave him something to focus on, offered some fleeting reassurance that he had some degree of control over his life after death.

He leaned back in his chair and combed his fingers through his hair, uncaring that he was undoing his stylist’s hard work after the Expo.

“Alright, let’s get to work.”

xxx

“Kid, drop the tablet a minute and step up.”

“I’m researching.”

“You can multi-task.”

“I thought you told me _not_ to multi-task.”

“I told you to start using a tablet to run your numbers when you’re tagging along to meetings,” Tony corrected. “It looks suspicious when you magically recite the exact figures someone mentioned on a dime without even pausing. There’s no need for that pretence here, c’mon.”

Peter sighed but left the tablet on the table and followed Tony over to the ring.

“Why so reluctant? I thought you _wanted_ to expand your capabilities.”

“I still do, I just don’t like boxing.”

“You don’t _like_ it?” Tony repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s a perfectly suitable sport that I’m sure will help to improve your strength and cardiovascular health, but it seems like an…impractical choice in terms of self-defence. No amount of practice will increase my strength or improve my co-ordination, the exercise seems pointless.”

“Fair point. Try throwing a few punches, I want to see if the new shoulder improves your form.”

He pressed a small, flat disk to the surface of one of the reinforced punching bags before gesturing for Peter to proceed.

“You know the drill.”

The updates seemed to do the trick if Tony’s hums of approval were any indication. Peter threw a few more practice punches before he started experimenting with applying force.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Knock yourself out, kid,” Tony replied, his focus already slipping from their conversation. JARVIS would review the footage and conduct a more thorough analysis, but already he could see a big improvement. The movement of his arms looked less stiff, the way he shifted his weight as he pulled back an arm so close to being human.

If not for the tell-tale solidity of the metal beneath his synthetic skin, Tony thought he might be able to fool Happy in a sparring match. Maybe with the boxing gloves to soften the impact…

“Why haven’t you replaced me yet?”

Tony froze, though Peter didn’t so much as miss a beat between punches.

“Why would I replace you, kid?”

The LMD shrugged, the movement throwing him off his rhythm.

“Stay focused. Try hitting a little harder, I want to see if the modifications reduce the impact of your punches at all.”

“Right, sorry.”

Tony took a deep breath, knowing full well that he’d be giving up the perfect opportunity to let the subject drop. One word from him, and Peter would never raise the subject again.

“What makes you think I’d have any reason to replace you?” he rephrased.

“Your behavioural profile.”

“Expand upon that?”

Peter sighed, sinking his fist into the bag. It swung on its chain, the stand straining to remain upright through the sudden shift in weight.

“I trust you’re familiar with the ship of Theseus paradox?”

Tony tried to follow the sudden shift in thinking. “Rings a bell. It’s a thought experiment.”

Peter nodded and threw another punch. “It’s one of the oldest in Western philosophy, with documentation existing that it was even discussed by-“

“I don’t need a history lesson,” Tony cut in. The LMD still tended to get side-tracked providing context he’d found on the internet. “Skip to the point.”

“Right. The experiment proposes that if someone were to periodically replace any rotting wood on a ship with fresh planks, it is conceivable that every single piece of the original ship may be replaced by new components over time. If the rot was somehow cured in all of the original pieces of the ship, and these pieces were used to form a complete reconstruction of the ship of Theseus the reconstruction would be indistinguishable from the ship still sailing. At this point, which ship is the true ship of Theseus? The one reconstructed, or the one replaced?”

“Again, your point?”

“My point,” Peter continued, “is that you’re replacing all of my component parts. My hardware needs to be upgraded, and yet you replace the individual components instead of taking the more practical route of designing an updated model from scratch as you have with the Iron Man suits. Either way, you ultimately create a new product, so what’s stopping you?”

Tony remained silent through the explanation, turning over the words in his head.

“That’s enough punching for now, JARVIS should have all the data he’ll need to compare your results.”

Peter stepped out of his stance, no trace of exertion in his face or form. Tony toyed with the idea of allowing him to simulate some of the symptoms of physical strain. It wouldn’t be difficult to imitate laboured breathing.

Once again, he forced aside the temptation to dodge the question altogether.

“I’ve never replaced Dum-E,” Tony pointed out as he pried the disk off the punching bag and slipped it into his pocket. “Same with U, same with Butterfingers. Taken apart? Yes. Switched out damaged components, upgraded outdated software, yes. But never _replaced_.”

“You didn’t design them to serve a purpose.”

“Of course I did, they’re lab assistants.”

“They _became_ lab assistants. You could build better, more efficient ones in a heartbeat…but you never created the bots for the purpose of being efficient. The same way you didn’t create JARVIS just to be a butler.”

A chill ran up Tony’s spine as he listened to his own creation dissect his motivations.

“And you? I suppose you think I built you to be more than just a prototype for an abandoned military project?” he asked. He didn’t mean for the words to sound so biting, but he didn’t appreciate being cross-examined.

“Of course,” Peter said, brow furrowing as his lips twitched to form a slight frown. He looked…_confused_.

“Then what?” Tony asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. “What did I build you for?”

“Don’t you know?”

A retort sat on the tip of his tongue, but Tony found he didn’t really want to lash out. He had no _reason_ to. There were no politics involved in conversations with the LMD. No smoke screens, no hidden double meanings and underlying motives. He could be blunt without worrying about how it would shape their opinions, he could be honest without fearing his words would find their way to print. Aside from JARVIS – and before him, Jarvis – Tony didn’t have a great many people in his life he could be so completely transparent with.

Sometimes he found it difficult to remember why the distinction was important

Tony shook his head. “Change the subject.”

Peter stiffened before his expression once again relaxed into an easy smile. “You might want to start warming up for your boxing lesson. Happy should be arriving soon.”

xxx

“Tony,” Pepper said, growing more exasperated by the second.

“Paperwork’s not even here yet. I’ve got time.”

She shook her head as he went back to his warmups. “Couldn’t have tried to look a _little_ more professional…Handing over his company for God’s sake.”

Despite the muttering, Peter detected a note of fondness in her tone. He’d been working on that – distinguishing between Tony and Pepper’s usual, almost playful banter and the indicators that a more serious argument was brewing.

“He trusts you,” Peter said, earning an odd look from Pepper. “If it means anything, I think you’ll be a great CEO.”

Pepper didn’t reply at first. When at last she did, her voice dropped several registers as if afraid someone would overhear them from across the room.

“It means something.”

They watched in silence as Tony climbed into the ring with Happy, each side throwing a few experimental punches before they fell into an awkward rhythm. Pepper hadn’t been alone in voicing her concerns when Tony announced that Happy would be giving him lessons. The bodyguard’s stubborn refusal to admit how much time had passed since his boxing days suggested it was still something of a sore subject. Still, even if he spent most of their sessions scolding Tony for breaking one of the countless counterproductive rules he insisted on implementing, Happy made a decent teacher.

Pepper sighed, growing impatient watching the pair trade blows. “I better make a call. The notary should be here by now.”

Peter didn’t have any reason to protest, instead he watched Tony attempt to block one of Happy’s hits with his forearms.

“You’re not distributing your weight correctly,” Peter noted and Happy gave him a begrudging look of approval.

“Really? More like this?” Tony asked, reassuming the blocking position but this time placing his feet more evenly apart.

Peter tilted his head. “I think you’re still too squared, you should face him at more of an angle. And lean your weight more into your forward foot, your posture is effecting the stability of your stance.”

“Hey, who’s the teacher here again?”

“Sorry, Mr Hogan.”

Pepper looked distinctly unimpressed when she returned to Tony catching Happy in the nose with his elbow, a move that promptly kicked off an argument about the difference between MMA and dirty boxing.

“They’ll be here any minute,” she reminded him, rolling her eyes when Tony once again waved her off.

Peter continued to chime in with odd comments and suggestions to Happy’s growing bemusement. As the minutes ticked by, Pepper began to consult her wristwatch more and more frequently.

“Maybe I should call them back,” she said. Despite the situation, she maintained a calm demeanour.

Peter tilted his head as he interfaced with JARVIS, dropping his voice to ensure Happy wouldn’t overhear his reply. “I don’t think that will be necessary, there’s a car pulling up outside.”

“The notary?”

He took another moment, waiting for her to step in clear view of the CCTV cameras to consult the company’s employment records.

“It looks like it. I estimate she’ll enter in the next forty seconds or so.”

Pepper let out a sigh of relief.

The actual process didn’t take long. The paperwork itself had already been reviewed and revised to Pepper’s satisfaction. All that was left to do was sign.

Peter found the notary to be a difficult woman to read, but in fairness he still didn’t have much practice interacting with people outside of Tony and Pepper (although he supposed that list could be stretched to include Happy and Rhodey). She watched him with a look that couldn’t quite be described as surprise. A complex mix of emotions which he thought might include curiosity crossed her face as she approached them.

“Miss Potts,” she greeted with an inviting smile. Behind her, Happy landed a blow to the side of Tony’s head to get his attention. Tony retaliated with a high kick to the chest.

“Kicks are illegal in boxing, Mr Stark,” Peter reminded him, but Happy appeared to have given up on trying to convince Tony to stick to the many pointless rules.

Despite displaying no real interest in the legal process before this point, Tony appeared to take great interest in Miss Romanoff. A mirrored look of resignation crossed both Happy and Pepper’s face as he requested she step into the ring, as if they’d already witnessed the scene far too many times to have retained any hope of stopping it.

“Who is she?” Tony asked the second he stepped away, leaving Happy to distract her with a “boxing lesson”.

“Natalie Rushman received her certification as a notary public two years ago. As of yet, this is her first time working with Stark Industries, with her primary employers in the past being government-based. She has an outstanding professional reputation with countless letters of recommendations included in her resume, all singing her praises. She also has a long history of charity, along with modelling experience before she decided to retrain as a solicitor.”

“She’s been brought on for this job _specifically_, Tony. That means you only have to keep your blatant ogling to a minimum long enough to sign the papers, think you can manage that?”

Tony pouted. “I could use a new personal assistant, what with you running the company now and all. She certainly _seems_ well quali-“

“If you _really_ need an assistant, give Peter a promotion,” she deadpanned. “He already handles most of your paperwork.”

Instead of dismissing the idea offhand, Tony looked thoughtful. He was saved having to come up with a response by the deafening thud that rocked the room.

“Oh my God, _Happy!_” Pepper all but shrieked as Miss Rushman performed a flawless takedown that _definitely_ wasn’t legal in boxing. She restrained the bodyguard in a perfect triangle choke just long enough to prove he was incapacitated, but not long enough to render him unconscious. It seemed Happy’s pride prevented him from tapping out – or maybe he’d just been too stunned by the display to react.

Pepper may have looked horrified, but Peter was _fascinated_. Boxing was limited. It had merit as a sport, but too many pointless rules to be a truly effective means of self-defence.

Tony’s experimentation with different styles had seemed more effective, but he lacked the experience still to do much more than borrow odd techniques from different disciplines. When taken by surprise, his hand instinctively raised open palmed as if to fire a repulsor rather than block. He’d improve with practice, but it was already abundantly clear that Miss Rushman _had_ practice.

He consulted her files again as she stood up and brushed herself off. Karate, Judo, and of course boxing…but this display indicated far more experience than a smattering of introductory training courses would allow. He couldn’t find an exact match for the manoeuvre she’d performed, but it implied at least a passing familiarity with a grapple-based discipline. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu seemed most likely, even if her records gave no indication she’d ever studied it.

Happy may be out of practice, but he still held the advantage of both height and weight over her…Yet even distracted and with Happy making the first move, she took him down without fault or hesitation. When she rose to her feet, not a hair looked out of place.

Natalie Rushman was _good_.

“I need your impression,” she told Tony as she retrieved her folder, and he replied without missing a beat.

“You have a quiet reserve, an old soul-”

“I _meant_ your fingerprint.” Natalie looked more amused than anything.

“Honestly,” Pepper muttered, too quiet for either of them to hear. Their conversation came to a rather abrupt end when she entered the scene, a pleasant smile replacing the disapproving glare she’d been sending Tony’s way just a moment before.

Rushman met his eye only once before she left, and again he failed to comprehend her expression. Had he been human, he may have had a better chance of recognising her cautious, calculating look as a mirror image of his own. Both, in their own way, attempting to appraise something completely unexpected and entirely unpredictable.

“I still want one,” Tony sighed as she left the room.

“_No_.”

xxx

SHIELD took great care in choosing the meeting point for their debrief. Meeting in person at all during an undercover mission was an immense risk, but when dealing with Tony Stark it would be an even greater one to try anything involving technology. Her mind immediately went to the old-school tactics she’d been taught to follow, but a brief message passed through an open dead drop simply wouldn’t cut it with this particular assignment. Besides, if Stark had reason to suspect her…

Let’s just say that, in this day and age, a hired car pulling up outside her apartment building drew a lot less attention than CCTV footage of her burying a USB stick in a park.

She climbed into the backseat of the limousine where the windows were tinted almost black with only the streetlights to provide illumination. The partition between the backseat and the driver remained closed, the car pulling away from the curb without a word.

“We have a problem,” she stated, doing away with unnecessary formalities.

“Did he make you?”

“Not as far as I could tell.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He didn’t take the bait.”

“That is…unexpected.”

She kept her head turned to face the tinted glass, keeping an eye on the silhouette in the reflection. His body language didn’t reflect disappointment so much as surprise – maybe there were other factors at play after all.

“It may still be possible to position another agent to take the role,” he reflected. “You would have been ideal, but clearly we misread his situation. Perhaps we misjudged his relationship with Miss Potts after all.”

“There’s something else. Miss Potts had someone assisting her. By the sound of it, he may be well placed to assume her role as Stark’s personal assistant.”

“Someone new?”

“A boy. Couldn’t have been older than twenty.” _But he looks a lot younger than that_, she thought but didn’t say. Age could be a tricky thing to judge, even with her training.

“A _boy_,” he repeated. “Stark doesn’t just let anyone in off the street. What’s the connection?”

Natasha shook her head. “I don’t have much more than that, not even a surname.”

“But you caught a first name?”

“They called him Peter.”

The director shifted, meeting her eye for the first time since she’d entered the vehicle.

“This was supposed to be a straightforward assignment,” he sighed, and she quirked an eyebrow.

“Is anything ever straightforward where Stark’s involved?”

“Touché.”

“How would you like me to proceed?”

“You’re the best we have. If the PA job fell through, see if you can work another angle.”

“And if that fails?”

Director Fury stilled. “We’ll look into the boy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that you know that I know that asking for opinions is a polite way of begging you to pLEASE COMMENT but, in this case, I would genuinely like to know your thoughts on the direction I've taken this chapter in. Over the course of this fic I've gone back and forth a LOT between angst and internal conflict and tooth rotting fluff. It seems like I get more comments praising fluff? Is that what you guys want more of in future? Cause, quite honestly, I enjoy writing both so if there's something you want to see more of I'm happy to oblige.
> 
> Either way, I hope you guys (at least somewhat) enjoyed!


End file.
